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BOOKS BY RICHARD HARDING DAVIS 
Published by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



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WITH THE FRENCH 
IN FRANCE AND SALONIKA 




General Sarrail, commanding the Allied armies in Greece, 
making his first landing in Salonika. 



y WITH 

THE FRENCH 

IN FRANCE AND 
SALONIKA 



BY 

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS 

ATJTHOH OF WITH THE ALLIES 



ILLUSTRATED 



J 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1916 

<L> o V° Y "^ 



H 



70- 5" 4 



Copyright, 1916, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published April, 1916 




MAY 3 1916 

©CI.A428802 XT' 



TO THE MEMORY 
OP 

JUSTUS MILES FORMAN 



PREFACE 

This book was written during the three 
last months of 1915 and the first month of 
this year in the form of letters from France, 
Greece, Serbia, and England. The writer 
visited ten of the twelve sectors of the 
French front, seeing most of them from the 
first trench, and was also on the French- 
British front in the Balkans. Outside of 
Paris the French cities visited were Verdun, 
Amiens, St. Die, Arras, Chalons, Nancy, and 
Rheims. What he saw served to strengthen 
his admiration for the French army and, as 
individuals and as a nation, for the French 
people, and to increase his confidence in the 
ultimate success of their arms. 

This success he believes would come sooner 
were all the fighting concentrated in Europe. 
To scatter the forces of the Allies in expedi- 

vii 



PREFACE 

tions overseas, he submits, only weakens the 
main attack and the final victory. At the 
present moment, outside of her armies for 
defense in England and for offense in Flan- 
ders, Great Britain is supporting armies in 
Egypt, German East Africa, Salonika, and 
Mesopotamia. No one who has seen in 
actual being one of these vast expeditions, 
any one of which in the past would have 
commanded the interest of the entire world, 
can appreciate how seriously they cripple 
the main offensive. Each robs it of hundreds 
of thousands of men needed in the trenches, 
of the transports required to carry those 
men, of war-ships to convoy them, of hospital 
ships to mend them, of medical men, medical 
stores, aeroplanes, motor-trucks, ambulances, 
machine-guns, field-guns, siege-guns, and mil- 
lions upon millions of rounds of ammuni- 
tion. 

Transports that from neutral ports should 
be carrying bully beef, grain, and munitions, 
are lying idle at a rent per day of many hun- 

viii 



PREFACE 

dreds of thousands of pounds, in the harbors 
of Moudros, Salonika, Aden, Alexandria, in 
the Persian Gulf, and scattered along both 
coasts of Africa. They are guarded by war- 
ships withdrawn from duty in the Channel 
and North Sea. What, in lives lost, these 
expeditions have cost both France and Great 
Britain, we know; what they have cost in 
millions of money, it would be impossible 
even to guess. 

For these excursions far afield it is not 
the military who are responsible. There is 
the highest authority for believing neither 
General Jofire nor Lord Kitchener approves 
of them. They are efforts launched for 
political effect by loyal and well-meaning, 
but possibly mistaken, members of the two 
governments. By them these expeditions 
were sent forth to seize some place in the 
sun already held by Germany, to prevent 
other places falling into her hands, or in the 
hope of turning some neutral power into an 
ally. It was merely dancing to Germany's 

ix 



PREFACE 

music. It postponed and weakened the 
main attack. This war should be fought 
in France. If it is, Germany will be utterly- 
defeated; she cannot long survive such an- 
other failure as Verdun, or even should she 
eventually occupy Verdun could she survive 
such a victory. When she no longer is a 
military threat all she possessed before the 
war, and whatever territory she has taken 
since she began the war, will automatically 
revert to the Allies. It then will be time 
enough to restore to Belgium, Serbia, Poland, 
and other rightful owners the possessions of 
which Germany has robbed, them. If you 
surprise a burglar, his pockets stuffed with 
the family jewels, would you first attempt to 
recover the jewels, or to subdue the burglar? 
Before retrieving your possessions would it 
not be better strategy to wait until the 
burglar is down and out, and the police are 
adjusting the handcuffs? 

In the first chapter of this book is re- 
printed a letter I wrote from Paris to the 



PREFACE 

papers of the Wheeler Syndicate, stating 
that in no part of Europe was our country 
popular. It was a hint given from one 
American speaking in confidence to another, 
and as from one friend to another. It was 
not so received. To my suggestion that in 
Europe we are losing friends, the answer in- 
variably was: "We should worry!" That 
is not a good answer. With a nation it 
surely should be as with the individuals who 
compose it. If, when an individual is told 
he has lost the good opinion of his friends, 
he sings, "I don't care, I don't care!" he 
exhibits only bad manners. 

The other reply made to the warning was 
personal abuse. That also is the wrong 
answer. To kill the messenger of ill tidings 
is an ancient prerogative; but it leads no- 
where. If it is true that we are losing our 
friends we should try to find out whose 
fault it is that we lost them, and our wish 
should be to bring our friends back. 

Men of different countries of Europe re- 

xi 



PREFACE 

peatedly told me that all of a century must 
elapse before America can recover the pres- 
tige she has lost since this war began. My 
answer was that it was unintelligent to judge 
ninety million people by the acts, or lack of 
action, of one man, and that to recover our 
lost prestige will take us no longer than is re- 
quired to get rid of that man. As soon as we 
elect a new President and a new Congress, 
who are not necessarily looking for trouble, 
but who will not crawl under the bed to 
avoid it, our lost prestige will return. 

In the meantime, that France and her 
Allies succeed should be the hope and prayer 
of every American. The fight they are wag- 
ing is for the things the real, unhyphen- 
ated American is supposed to hold most high 
and most dear. Incidentally, they are fight- 
ing his fight, for their success will later save 
him, unprepared as he is to defend himself, 
from a humiliating and terrible thrashing. 
And every word and act of his now that 
helps the Allies is a blow against frightful- 

xii 



PREFACE 

ness, against despotism, and in behalf of a 
broader civilization, a nobler freedom, and 
a much more pleasant world in which to 
live. 

Richard Harding Davis. 

April ii, 1916. 



Xlll 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. President Poincare Thanks America ... 3 

II. The Mud Trenches of Artois 35 

III. The Zigzag Front of Champagne 55 

IV. From Paris to the Piraeus 79 

V. Why King Constantine Is Neutral ... 97 

VI. With the Allies in Salonika. in 

VII. Two Boys Against an Army 152 

VIII. The French-British Front in Serbia . . . 165 

IX. Verdun and St. Mihiel 188 

X. War in the Vosges 210 

XL Hints for Those Who Want to Help . . 223 

XII. London, a Year Later 245 



xv 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

General Sarrail, commanding the Allied armies in 
Greece, making his first landing in Salonika 

Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

President Poincare on a visit to the front 18 

"Of another house the roof only remained, from under 

it the rest of the building had been shot away" . . 48 

The stone roof over this glass chandelier in the Arras 
cathedral was destroyed by shells, and the chan- 
delier not touched 50 

General Franchet d'Esperay 70 

King Constantine of Greece and commander-in-chief of 

her armies 102 

"In Salonika the water-front belongs to everybody" . 122 

"On one side of the quay, a moving-picture palace, 

. . . on the other a boat unloading fish " 124 

Outside the Citadel, which is mediaeval, Salonika is 

modern and Turkish 126 

"The quay supplied every spy — German, Bulgarian, 

Turk, or Austrian — with an uninterrupted view" 138 

"Hills bare of trees, from which the snow that ran 
down their slopes had turned the road into a sea 

of mud" 154 

xvii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

American war correspondents at the French front in 

Serbia 160 

Headquarters of the French commander in Grevac, 

Serbia 172 

After the retreat from Serbia 176 

The ruined village of Gerbeviller, destroyed after their 

retreat by the Germans 190 

"Through these woods ran a toy railroad" 192 

A first-line trench outside of Verdun 200 

A valley in Argonne showing a forest destroyed by 

shells 208 

War in the forest 216 

A poster inviting the proprietors of restaurants and 
hotels and their guests to welcome the soldiers who 
have permission to visit Paris, especially those 
who come from the districts invaded by the Ger- 
mans 228 

All over France, on Christmas Day and the day after, 
money was collected to send comforts and things 

to eat to the men at the front 232 



A poster advertising the fund to bring from the trenches 
"permissionaires," those soldiers who obtain per- 
mission to return home for six days 236 

"Very interestin'. You ought to frame it " 252 

"They have women policemen now" 262 



xviu 



WITH THE FRENCH 
IN FRANCE AND SALONIKA 



CHAPTER I 

PRESIDENT POINCARE THANKS 
AMERICA 

Paris, October, 1915. 

WHILE still six hundred miles from the 
French coast the passengers on the 
Chicago of the French line entered what 
was supposed to be the war zone. 

In those same waters, just as though the 
reputation of the Bay of Biscay was not suf- 
ficiently scandalous, two ships of the line 
had been torpedoed. 

So, in preparation for what the captain 
tactfully called an "accident," we rehearsed 
abandoning ship. 

It was like the fire-drills in our public 
schools. It seemed a most sensible precau- 
tion, and one that in times of peace, as well 
as of war, might with advantage be enforced 
on all passenger-ships. 

3 



PRESIDENT POINCARE 

In his proclamation Commandant Mace 
of the Chicago borrowed an idea from the 
New York Fire Department. It was the 
warning Commissioner Adamson prints on 
theatre programmes, and which casts a gloom 
over patrons of the drama by instructing 
them to look for the nearest fire-escape. 

Each passenger on the Chicago was as- 
signed to a life-boat. He was advised to find 
out how from any part of the ship at which 
he might be caught he could soonest reach it. 

Women and children were to assemble on 
the boat deck by the boat to which they were 
assigned. After they had been lowered to 
the water, the men — who, meanwhile, were 
to be segregated on the deck below them — 
would descend by rope ladders. 

Entrance to a boat was by ticket only. 
The tickets were six inches square and bore 
a number. If you lost your ticket you lost 
your life. Each of the more imaginative 
passengers insured his life by fastening the 
ticket to his clothes with a safety-pin. 

4 



THANKS AMERICA 

Two days from land there was a full-dress 
rehearsal, and for the first time we met those 
with whom we were expected to put to sea 
in an open boat. 

Apparently those in each boat were se- 
lected by lot. As one young doctor in the 
ambulance service put it: "The society in 
my boat is not at all congenial." 

The only other persons originally in my 
boat were Red Cross nurses of the Post unit 
and infants. In trampling upon them to 
safety I foresaw no difficulty. 

But at the dress rehearsal the purser 
added six dark and dangerous-looking Span- 
iards. It developed later that by profession 
they were bull-fighters. Any man who is 
not afraid of a bull is entitled to respect. 
But being cast adrift with six did not ap- 
peal. 

One could not help wondering what would 
happen if we ran out of provisions and the 
bull-fighters grew hungry. I tore up my 
ticket and planned to swim. 

5 



PRESIDENT POINCARfc 

Some of the passengers took the rehearsal 
to heart, and, all night, fully dressed, espe- 
cially as to boots, tramped the deck. As the 
promenade-deck is directly over the cabins, 
not only they did not sleep but neither did 
any one else. 

The next day they began to see periscopes. 
For this they were not greatly to be blamed. 
The sea approach to Bordeaux is flagged 
with black buoys supporting iron masts that 
support the lights, and in the rain and fog 
they look very much like periscopes. 

But after the passengers had been thrilled 
by the sight of twenty of them, they became 
so bored with false alarms that had a real 
submarine appeared they were in a mood to 
invite the captain on board and give him a 
drink. 

While we still were anxiously keeping 
watch, a sail appeared upon the horizon. 
Even the strongest glasses could make noth- 
ing of it. A young, very young Frenchman 
ran to the bridge and called to the officers: 

6 



THANKS AMERICA 

"Gentlemen, will you please tell me what 
boat it is that I see?" 

Had he asked the same question of an 
American captain while that officer was on 
the bridge, the captain would have turned 
his back. An English captain would have 
put him in irons. 

But the French captain called down to 
him: "She is pilot-boat No. 28. The pilot's 
name is Jean Baptiste. He has a wife and 
four children in Bordeaux, and others in 
Brest and Havre. He is fifty years old and 
has a red nose and a wart on his chin. Is 
there anything else you would like to know?" 

At daybreak, as the ship swept up the 
Gironde to Bordeaux, we had our first view 
of the enemy. 

We had passed the vineyards and those 
chateaux the names of which every wine- 
card in every part of the world helps to keep 
famous and familiar, and had reached the 
outskirts of the city. Here the banks are 
close together, so close that one almost can 

7 



PRESIDENT POINCARfc 

hail those on shore; but there was a heavy- 
rain and the mist played tricks. 

When I saw a man in a black overcoat 
with the brass buttons wider apart across 
the chest than at the belt line, like those of 
our traffic police in summer-time, I thought 
it was a trick of the mist. Because the uni- 
form that, by a nice adjustment of buttons, 
tries to broaden the shoulders and decrease 
the waist, is not being worn much in France. 
Not if a French sharpshooter sees it first. 

But the man in the overcoat was not 
carrying a rifle on his shoulder. He was 
carrying a bag of cement, and from the hull 
of the barge others appeared, each with a 
bag upon his shoulder. There was no mis- 
taking them. Nor their little round caps, 
high boots, and field uniforms of gray-green. 

It was strange that the first persons we 
should see since we left the wharf at the foot 
of Fifteenth Street, North River, the first we 
should see in France, should not be French 
people, but German soldiers. 

8 



THANKS AMERICA 

Bordeaux had the good taste to burn down 
when the architect who designed the Place 
de la Concorde, in Paris, and the buildings 
facing it was still alive; and after his designs, 
or those of his pupils, Bordeaux was rebuilt. 
So wherever you look you see the best in 
what is old and the smartest in what is 
modern. 

Certainly when to that city President Poin- 
care and his cabinet moved the government, 
they gave it a resting-place that was both 
dignified and charming. To walk the streets 
and wharfs is a continual delight. One is 
never bored. It is like reading a book in 
which there are no dull pages. 

Everywhere are the splendid buildings of 
Louis XV, statues, parks, monuments, 
churches, great arches that once were the 
outer gates, and many miles of quays redo- 
lent, not of the sea, but of the wine to which 
the city gives her name. 

But to-day to walk the streets of Bordeaux 
saddens as well as delights. There are so 

9 



PRESIDENT POINCARfc 

many wounded. There are so many women 
and children all in black. It is a relief when 
you learn that the wounded are from differ- 
ent parts of France, that they have been sent 
to Bordeaux to recuperate and are greatly 
in excess of the proportion of wounded you 
would find in other cities. 

But the women and children in black are 
not convalescents. Their wounds heal slowly, 
or not at all. 

At the wharfs a white ship with gigantic 
American flags painted on her sides and with 
an American flag at the stern was unloading 
horses. They were for the French artillery 
and cavalry, but they were so glad to be free 
of the ship that their future state did not 
distress them. 

Instead, they kicked joyously, scattering 
the sentries, who were jet-black Turcos. As 
one of them would run from a plunging 
horse, the others laughed at him with that 
contagious laugh of the darky that is the 
same all the world over, whether he hails 

10 



THANKS AMERICA 

from Mobile or Tangiers, and he would re- 
turn sheepishly, with eyes rolling, protesting 
the horse was a "boche." 

Officers, who looked as though in times of 
peace they might be gentlemen jockeys, were 
receiving the remounts and identifying the 
brands on the hoof and shoulder that had 
been made by their agents in America. 

If the veterinary passed the horse, he was 
again marked, this time with regimental 
numbers, on the hoof with a branding-iron, 
and on the flanks with white paint. In ten 
days he will be given a set of shoes, and in a 
month he will be under fire. 

Colonel Count Rene de Montjou, who has 
been a year in America buying remounts, 
and who returned on the Chicago, discovered 
that one of the horses was a "substitut," 
and a very bad "substitut" he was. His 
teeth had been filed, but the French officers 
saw that he was all of eighteen years old. 

The young American who, in the interests 
of the contractor, was checking off the horses, 

ii 



PRESIDENT POINCARfi 

refused to be shocked. Out of the corner of 
his thin lips he whispered confidentially: 

"Suppose he is a ringer," he protested; 
"suppose he is eighteen years old, what's the 
use of their making a holler ? What's it mat- 
ter how old he is, if all they're going to do 
with him is to get him shot?" 

That night at the station, as we waited 
for the express to Paris, many recruits were 
starting for the front. There seemed to be 
thousands of them, all new; new sky-blue uni- 
forms, new soup-tureen helmets, new shoes. 

They were splendidly young and vigorous 
looking, and to the tale that France now is 
forced to call out only old men and boys they 
gave the lie. With many of them, to say 
farewell, came friends and family. There 
was one group that was all comedy, a hand- 
some young man under thirty, his mother 
and a young girl who might have been his 
wife or sister. 

They had brought him food for the jour- 
ney; chocolate, a long loaf, tins of sardines, 

12 



THANKS AMERICA 

a bottle of wine; and the fun was in trying 
to find any pocket, bag, or haversack not al- 
ready filled. They were all laughing, the 
little, fat mother rather mechanically, when 
the whistle blew. 

It was one of those shrill, long-drawn 
whistles without which in Europe no train 
can start. It had a peevish, infantile sound, 
like the squeak of a nursery toy. But it was 
as ominous as though some one had fired a 
siege-gun. 

The soldiers raced for the cars, and the 
one in front of me, suddenly grown grave, 
stooped and kissed the fat, little mother. 

She was still laughing; but at his embrace 
and at the meaning of it, at the thought that 
the son, who to her was always a baby, 
might never again embrace her, she tore her- 
self from him sobbing and fled — fled blindly 
as though to escape from her grief. 

Other women, their eyes filled with sud- 
den tears, made way, and with their ringers 
pressed to their lips turned to watch her. 

13 



PRESIDENT POINCARE 

The young soldier kissed the wife, or sister, 
or sweetheart, or whatever she was, sketchily 
on one ear and shoved her after the fleeing 
figure. 

"Guardez mama!" he said. 

It is the tragedy that will never grow less, 
and never grow old. 

One who left Paris in October, 1914, and 
returned in October, 1915, finds her calm, 
confident; her social temperature only a lit- 
tle below normal. 

A year ago the gray-green tidal wave of 
the German armies that threatened to en- 
gulf Paris had just been checked. With the 
thunder of their advance Paris was still 
shaken. The withdrawal of men to the 
front, and of women and children to Bor- 
deaux and the coast, had left the city unin- 
habited. The streets were as deserted as the 
Atlantic City board walk in January. For 
miles one moved between closed shops. 
Along the Aisne the lines had not been dug 
in, and hourly from the front ambulances, 

14 



THANKS AMERICA 

carrying the wounded and French and Brit- 
ish officers unwashed from the trenches, in 
mud-covered, bullet-scarred cars, raced down 
the echoing boulevards. In the few restau- 
rants open, you met men who that morning 
had left the firing-line, and who after de- 
jeuner, and the purchase of soap, cigarettes, 
and underclothes, by sunset would be back 
on the job. In those days Paris was inside 
the "fire-lines." War was in the air; you 
smelled it, saw it, heard it. 

To-day a man from Mars visiting Paris 
might remain here a week, and not know 
that this country is waging the greatest war 
in history. When you walk the crowded 
streets it is impossible to believe that within 
forty miles of you millions of men are facing 
each other in a death grip. This is so, first, 
because a great wall of silence has been 
built between Paris and the front, and, sec- 
ond, because the spirit of France is too alive, 
too resilient, occupied with too many inter- 
ests, to allow any one thing, even war, to 

is 



PRESIDENT POINCARE 

obsess it. The people of France have ac- 
cepted the war as they accept the rigors of 
winter. They may not like the sleet and 
snow of winter, but they are not going to let 
the winter beat them. In consequence, the 
shop windows are again dressed in their best, 
the kiosks announce comedies, revues, operas; 
in the gardens of the Luxembourg the beds 
are brilliant with autumn flowers, and the old 
gentlemen have resumed their games of cro- 
quet, the Champs-Elysees swarms with baby- 
carriages, and at the aperitif hour on the 
sidewalks there are no empty chairs. At 
many of the restaurants it is impossible to 
obtain a table. 

It is not the Paris of the days before the 
war. It is not "gay Paris." But it is a Paris 
going about her "business as usual." This 
spirit of the people awakens only the most 
sincere admiration. It shows great calm- 
ness, great courage, and a confidence that, 
for the enemy of France, must be disquiet- 
ing. Work for the wounded and for the fami- 

16 



THANKS AMERICA 

lies of those killed in action and who have 
been left without support continues. Only 
now, after a year of bitter experience, it is 
no longer hysterical. It has been systema- 
tized, made more efficient. It is no longer 
the work of amateurs, but of those who by 
daily practise have become experts. 

In Paris the signs of war are not nearly 
as much in evidence as the activities of 
peace. There are many soldiers; but, in 
Paris, you always saw soldiers. The only 
difference is that now they wear bandages, 
or advance on crutches. And, as opposed 
to these evidences of the great conflict going 
on only forty miles distant, are the flower 
markets around the Madeleine, the crowds 
of women in front of the jewels, furs, and 
manteaux in the Rue de la Paix. 

It is not that France is indifferent to the 
war. But that she has faith in her armies, 
in her generals. She can afford to wait. 
She drove the enemy from Paris; she is 
teaching French in Alsace; in time, when 

17 



PRESIDENT POINCARE 

Joffre is ready, she will drive the enemy 
across her borders. In her faith in Joffre, 
she opens her shops, markets, schools, thea- 
tres. It is not callousness she shows, but 
that courage and confidence that are the 
forerunners of success. 

But the year of war has brought certain 
changes. The search-lights have disappeared. 
It was found that to the enemy in the air 
they were less of a menace than a guide. 
So the great shafts of light that with maj- 
esty used to sweep the skies or cut a path 
into the clouds have disappeared. And nearly 
all other lights have disappeared. Those who 
drive motor-cars claim the pedestrians are 
careless; the pedestrians protest that the 
drivers of motor-cars are reckless. In any 
case, to cross a street at night is an adven- 
ture. 

Something else that has disappeared is the 
British soldier. A year ago he swarmed, 
now he is almost entirely absent. Outside 
of the hospital corps, a British officer in Paris 

18 



THANKS AMERICA 

is an object of interest. In their place are 
many Belgians, almost too many Belgians. 
Their new khaki uniforms are unsoiled. Un- 
like the French soldiers you see, few are 
wounded. The answer probably is that as 
they cannot return to their own country, 
they must make their home in that of their 
ally. And the front they defend so valiantly 
is not so extended that there is room for all. 
Meanwhile, as they wait for their turn in the 
trenches, they fill the boulevards and cafes. 

This is not true of the French officers. 
The few you see are convalescents, or on 
leave. It is not as it was last October, when 
Paris was part of the war zone. Up to a few 
days ago, until after seven in the evening, 
when the work of the day was supposed to 
be finished, an officer was not permitted to 
sit idle in a cafe. And now when you see 
one you may be sure he is recovering from 
a wound, or is on the General Staff, and for 
a few hours has been released from duty. 

It is very different from a year ago when 
19 



PRESIDENT POINCARfc 

every officer was fresh from the trenches — 
and, fresh is not quite the word, either — and 
he would talk freely to an eager, sympa- 
thetic group of the battle of the night before. 
Now the wall of silence stretches around 

TAISEZ-VOUS ! 

MEFIEZ-VOUSI 

Les oreilles ennemies 
vous ecoutent 

Reproduction of placard warning France against spies. 

Paris. By posters it is even enforced upon 
you. Before the late minister of war gave up 
his portfolio, by placards he warned all 
when in public places to be careful of what 
they said. "Taisez-vous! Mefiez-vous. Les 
oreilles ennemies vous ecoutent." "Be silent. 
Be distrustful. The ears of the enemies are 

20 



THANKS AMERICA 

listening." This warning against spies was 
placed in tramways, railroad-trains, cafes. 
A cartoonist refused to take the good advice 
seriously. His picture shows one of the 
women conductors in a street-car asking a 
passenger where he is going. The passenger 
points to the warning. "Silence," he says, 
"some one may be listening." 

There are other changes. A year ago gold 
was king. To imagine any time or place 
when it is not is difficult. But to-day an 
American twenty-dollar bill gives you a 
higher rate of exchange than an American 
gold double-eagle. A thousand dollars in 
bills in Paris is worth thirty dollars more to 
you than a thousand dollars in gold. And 
to carry it does not make you think you are 
concealing a forty-five Colt. The decrease 
in value is due to the fact that you cannot 
take gold out of the country. That is true 
of every country in Europe, and of any kind 
of gold. At the border it is taken from you 
and in exchange you must accept bills. So, 

21 



PRESIDENT POINCARfc 

any one in Paris, wishing to travel, had best 
turn over his gold to the Bank of France. He 
will receive not only a good rate of exchange 
but also an engraved certificate testifying that 
he has contributed to the national defense. 
Another curious vagary of the war that 
obtains now is the sudden disappearance of 
the copper sou or what ranks with our penny. 
Why it is scarce no one seems to know. The 
generally accepted explanation is that the 
copper has flown to the trenches where mil- 
lions of men are dealing in small sums. But 
whatever the reason, the fact remains. In 
the stores you receive change in postage- 
stamps, and, on the underground railroad, 
where the people have refused to accept 
stamps in lieu of coppers, there are incipient 
riots. One night at a restaurant I was given 
change in stamps and tried to get even with 
the house by unloading them as his tip on 
the waiter. He protested eloquently. "Let- 
ters I never write," he explained. "To write 
letters makes me ennui. And yet if I wrote 

22 



THANKS AMERICA 

for a hundred years I could not use all the 
stamps my patrons have forced upon me. ,, 

These differences the year has brought 
about are not lasting, and are unimportant. 
The change that is important, and which 
threatens to last a long time, is the differ- 
ence in the sentiment of the French people 
toward Americans. 

Before the war we were not unduly flat- 
tering ourselves if we said the attitude of 
the French toward the United States was 
friendly. There were reasons why they 
should regard us at least with tolerance. 
We were very good customers. From dif- 
ferent parts of France we imported wines 
and silks. In Paris we spent, some of us 
spent, millions on jewels and clothes. In 
automobiles and on Cook's tours every sum- 
mer Americans scattered money from Brit- 
tany to Marseilles. They were the natural 
prey of Parisian hotel-keepers, restaurants, 
milliners, and dressmakers. We were a sis- 
ter republic, the two countries swapped stat- 

23 



PRESIDENT POINCARE 

lies of their great men — we had not forgot- 
ten Lafayette, France honored Paul Jones. 
A year ago, in the comic papers, between 
John Bull and Uncle Sam, it was not Uncle 
Sam who got the worst of it. Then the war 
came and with it, in the feeling toward our- 
selves, a complete change. A year ago we were 
almost one of the Allies, much more popular 
than Italians, more sympathetic than the 
English. To-day we are regarded, not with 
hostility, but with amazed contempt. 

This most regrettable change was first 
brought about by President Wilson's letter 
calling upon Americans to be neutral. The 
French could not understand it. From their 
point of view it was an unnecessary affront. 
It was as unexpected as the cut direct from a 
friend; as unwarranted, as gratuitous, as a 
slap in the face. The millions that poured 
in from America for the Red Cross, the ser- 
vices of Americans in hospitals, were ac- 
cepted as the offerings of individuals, not as 
representing the sentiment of the American 

24 



THANKS AMERICA 

people. That sentiment, the French still 
insist in believing, found expression in the 
letter that called upon all Americans to be 
neutral, something which to a Frenchman is 
neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring. 

We lost caste in other ways. We supplied 
France with munitions, but, as a purchasing 
agent for the government put it to me, we are 
not losing much money by it, and, until the 
French Government protested, and the pro- 
test was printed all over the United States, 
some of our manufacturers supplied articles 
that were worthless. Doctor Charles W. 
Cowan, an American who in winter lives in 
Paris and Nice and spends his summers in 
America, showed me the half section of a 
shoe of which he said sixty thousand pairs 
had been ordered, until it was found that 
part of each shoe was made of brown paper. 
Certainly part of the shoe he showed me was 
made of brown paper. 

When an entire people, men, women, and 
children, are fighting for their national exis- 
ts 



PRESIDENT FOINCARfc 

tence, and their individual home and life, 
to have such evidences of Yankee smartness 
foisted upon them does not make for friend- 
ship. It inspired contempt. This unpleas- 
ant sentiment was strengthened by our fail- 
ure to demand satisfaction for the lives lost 
on the Lusitania, while at the same time 
our losses in dollars seemed to distress us so 
deeply. But more harmful and more un- 
fortunate than any other word or act was the 
statement of President Wilson that we might 
be "too proud to fight." This struck the 
French not only as proclaiming us a cow- 
ardly nation, but as assuming superiority 
over the man who not only would fight, but 
who was fighting. And as at that moment 
several million Frenchmen were fighting, it 
was natural that they should laugh. Every 
nation in Europe laughed. In an Italian 
cartoon Uncle Sam is shown, hat in hand, 
offering a "note" to the German Emperor 
and in another shooting Haitians. 
The legend reads: "He is too proud to 
26 



THANKS AMERICA 

fight the Kaiser, but not too proud to kill 
niggers." In London, "Too Proud to Fight" 
is in the music-halls the line surest of rais- 
ing a laugh, and the recruiting-stations show 
pictures of fat men, effeminates, degenerates, 
and cripples labelled: "These Are Too Proud 
to Fight! Are You?" 

The change of sentiment toward us in 
France is shown in many ways. To retail 
them would not help matters. But as one 
hears of them from Americans who, since 
the war began, have been working in the hos- 
pitals, on distributing committees, in the 
banking-houses, and as diplomats and con- 
suls, that our country is most unpopular is 
only too evident. 

It is the greater pity because the real feel- 
ing of our people toward France in this war 
is one of enthusiastic admiration. Of all the 
Allies, Americans probably hold for the 
French the most hearty good-feeling, affec- 
tion, and good-will. Through the govern- 
ment at Washington this feeling has been 

27 



PRESIDENT POINCARfc 

ill-expressed, if not entirely concealed. It is 
unfortunate. Mr. Kipling, whose manners 
are his own, has given as a toast: "Damn 
all neutrals." The French are more polite. 
But when this war is over we may find that 
in twelve months we have lost friends of 
many years. That over all the world we have 
lost them. 

That does not mean that for the help 
Americans have given France and her Allies, 
the Allies are ungrateful. That the French 
certainly are not ungrateful I was given as- 
surance by no less an authority than the 
President of the republic. His assurance 
was conveyed to the American people in a 
message of thanks. It is also a message of 
good-will. 

It recognizes and appreciates the sympathy 
shown to France in her present fight for lib- 
erty and civilization by those Americans 
who remember that when we fought for our 
liberty France was not neutral, but sent us 
Lafayette and Rochambeau, ships and sol- 

28 



THANKS AMERICA 

diers. It is a message of thanks from Presi- 
dent Poincare to those Americans who found 
it less easy to be neutral than to be grateful. 

It was my good fortune to be presented 
by Paul Benazet, a close personal friend of 
the President, and both an officer of the army 
and a deputy. As a deputy before the war 
he helped largely in passing the bills that 
called for three years of military service and 
for heavier artillery. As an officer he won 
the Legion of Honor and the Cross of War. 
Besides being a brilliant writer, M. Benazet 
is also an accomplished linguist, and as 
President Poincare does not express himself 
readily in English, and as my French is bet- 
ter suited to restaurants than palaces, he 
acted as our interpreter. 

The arrival of important visitors, M. Cam- 
bon, the former ambassador to the United 
States, and the new prime minister, M. 
Briand, delayed our reception, and while we 
waited we were escorted through the official 
rooms of the Elysee. It was a half-hour of 

29 



PRESIDENT POINCARfe 

most fascinating interest, not only because 
the vast salons were filled with what, in art, is 
most beautiful, but because we were brought 
back to the ghosts of other days. 

What we actually saw were the best of 
Gobelin tapestries, the best of Sevres china, 
the best of mural paintings. We walked on 
silken carpets, bearing the fleur-de-lis. We 
sat on sofas of embroidery as fine as an en- 
graving and as rich in color as a painting by 
Morland. The bright autumn sunshine il- 
luminated the ormulu brass of the First Em- 
pire, gilt eagles, crowns, cupids, and the only 
letter of the alphabet that always suggest 
one name. 

Those which we brought back to the 
rooms in which once they lived, planned, and 
plotted were the ghosts of Mme. de Pom- 
padour, Louis XVI, Murat, Napoleon I, and 
Napoleon III. We could imagine the first 
Emperor standing with his hands clasped be- 
hind him in front of the marble fireplace, his 
figure reflected in the full-length mirrors, his 

30 



THANKS AMERICA 

features in gold looking down at him from 
the walls and ceilings. We intruded even 
into the little room opening on the rose 
garden, where for hours he would pace the 
floor. 

But, perhaps, what was of greatest inter- 
est was the remarkable adjustment of these 
surroundings, royal and imperial, to the sim- 
ple and dignified needs of a republic. 

France is a military nation and at war, 
but the evidences of militarism were entirely 
absent. Our own White House is not more 
empty of uniforms. One got the impression 
that he was entering the house of a private 
gentleman — a gentleman of great wealth and 
taste. 

We passed at last through four rooms, in 
which were the secretaries of the President, 
and as we passed, the majordomo spoke our 
names, and the different gentlemen half rose 
and bowed. It was all so quiet, so calm, so 
free from telephones and typewriters, that 
you felt that, by mistake, you had been 

31 



PRESIDENT POINCARfi 

ushered into the library of a student or a 
Cabinet minister. 

Then in the fourth room was the President. 
Outside this room we were presented to M. 
Sainsere, the personal secretary of the Presi- 
dent, and without further ceremony M. 
Benazet opened the door, and in the smallest 
room of all, introduced me to M. Poincare. 
His portraits have rendered his features fa- 
miliar, but they do not give sufficiently the 
impression I received of kindness, firmness, 
and dignity. 

He returned to his desk and spoke in a 
low voice of peculiar charm. As though the 
better to have the stranger understand, he 
spoke slowly, selecting his words. 

"I have a great admiration/' he said, "for 
the effectiveness with which Americans have 
shown their sympathy with France. They 
have sent doctors, nurses, and volunteers to 
drive the ambulances to carry the wounded. 
I have visited the hospitals at Neuilly and 
other places; they are admirable. 

32 



THANKS AMERICA 

"The one at Juilly was formerly a college, 
but with ingenuity they have converted it 
into a hospital, most complete and most val- 
uable. The American colony in Paris has 
shown a friendship we greatly appreciate. 
Your ambassador I have met several times. 
Our relations are most pleasant, most sym- 
pathetic." 

I asked if I might repeat what he had said. 
The President gave his assent, and, after a 
pause, as though, now that he knew he 
would be quoted, he wished to emphasize 
what he had said, continued: 

"My wife, who distributes articles of com- 
fort, sent to the wounded and to families in 
need, tells me that Americans are among the 
most generous contributors. Many articles 
come anonymously — money, clothing, and 
comforts for the soldiers, and layettes for 
their babies. We recognize and appreciate 
the manner in which, while preserving a 
strict neutrality, your country men and 
women have shown their sympathy." 

33 



PRESIDENT POINCARfc 

The President rose and on leaving I pre- 
sented a letter from ex-President Roosevelt. 
It was explained that this was the second 
letter for him I had had from Colonel Roose- 
velt, but that when I was a prisoner with the 
Germans, I had judged it wise to swallow 
the first one, and that I had requested Colo- 
nel Roosevelt to write the second one on 
thin paper. The President smiled and passed 
the letter critically between his thumb and 
forefinger. 
"This one," he said, "is quite digestible." 
I carried away the impression of a kind 
and distinguished gentleman, who, in the 
midst of the greatest crisis in history, could 
find time to dictate a message of thanks to 
those he knew were neutrals only in name. 



34 



CHAPTER II 

THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

Amiens, October, 1915. 

IN England it is "business as usual"; in 
France it is "war as usual." The Eng- 
lish tradesman can assure his customers that 
with such an "old-established" firm as his 
not even war can interfere; but France, with 
war actually on her soil, has gone further 
and has accepted war as part of her daily 
life. She has not merely swallowed, but di- 
gested it. It is like the line in Pinero's play, 
where one woman says she cannot go to the 
opera because of her neuralgia. Her friend 
replies: "You can have neuralgia in my box 
as well as anywhere else." In that spirit 
France has accepted the war. The neuralgia 
may hurt, but she does not take to her bed 
and groan. Instead, she smiles cheerfully 

35 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

and goes about her duties — even sits in her 
box at the opera. 

As we approached the front this was even 
more evident than in Paris, where signs of 
war are all but invisible. Outside of Amiens 
we met a regiment of Scots with the pipes 
playing and the cold rain splashing their 
bare legs. To watch them we leaned from 
the car window. That we should be inter- 
ested seemed to surprise them; no one else 
was interested. A year ago when they passed 
it was "Roses, roses, all the way" — or at 
least cigarettes, chocolate, and red wine. 
Now, in spite of the skirling bagpipes, no one 
turned his head; to the French they had be- 
come a part of the landscape. 

A year ago the roads at every two hundred 
yards were barricaded. It was a continual 
hurdle-race. Now, except at distances of 
four or five miles, the barricades have disap- 
peared. One side of the road is reserved for 
troops, the other for vehicles. The vehi- 
cles we met — for the most part two-wheeled 

36 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

hooded carts — no longer contained peas- 
ants flying from dismantled villages. In- 
stead, they were on the way to market 
with garden-truck, pigs, and calves. On the 
drivers' seat the peasant whistled cheerily 
and cracked his whip. The long lines of 
London buses, that last year advertised soap, 
mustard, milk, and music-halls, and which 
now are a decorous gray; the ambulances; 
the great guns drawn by motor-trucks with 
caterpillar wheels, no longer surprise him. 

The English ally has ceased to be a stranger, 
and in the towns and villages of Artois is a 
"paying guest/' It is for him the shop-win- 
dows are dressed. The names of the towns 
are Flemish; the names of the streets are 
Flemish; the names over the shops are Flem- 
ish; but the goods for sale are marmalade, 
tinned kippers, The Daily Mail, and the 
Pink 'Un. 

"Is it your people who are selling these 
things?" I asked an English officer. 

The question amused him. 
37 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

"Our people won't think of it until the 
war is over," he said, "but the French are 
different. 

"They are capable, adaptable, and oblig- 
ing. If one of our men asks these shop- 
keepers for anything they haven't got they 
don't say, 'We don't keep it'; they get him 
to write down what it is he wants, and send 
for it." 

It is the better way. The Frenchman does 
not say, "War is ruining me"; he makes 
the war help to support him, and at the same 
time gives comfort to his ally. 

A year ago in the villages the old men 
stood in disconsolate groups with their hands 
in their pockets. Now they are briskly at 
work. They are working in the fields, in the 
vegetable-gardens, helping the Territorials 
mend the roads. On every side of them 
were the evidences of war — in the fields 
abandoned trenches, barbed-wire entangle- 
ments, shelters for fodder and ammunition, 
hangars for repairing aeroplanes, vast slaugh- 

38 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

ter-houses, parks of artillery; and on the 
roads endless lines of lorries, hooded ambu- 
lances, marching soldiers. 

To us those were of vivid interest, but to 
the French peasant they are in the routine 
of his existence. After a year of it war 
neither greatly distresses nor greatly inter- 
ests him. With one hand he fights; with 
the other he ploughs. 

We had made a bet as to which would see 
the first sign of real war, and the sign of it 
that won and that gave general satisfaction, 
even to the man who lost, was a group of 
German soldiers sweeping the streets of St. 
Pol. They were guarded only by one of their 
own number, and they looked fat, sleek, and 
contented. When, on our return from the 
trenches, we saw them again, we knew they 
were to be greatly envied. Between stand- 
ing waist-high in mud in a trench and being 
drowned in it, buried in it, blown up or as- 
phyxiated, the post of crossing-sweeper be- 
comes a sinecure. 

39 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

The next sign of war was more thrilling. 
It was a race between a French aeroplane 
and German shrapnel. To us the bursting 
shells looked like five little cotton balls. 
Since this war began shrapnel, when it 
bursts, has invariably been compared to balls 
of cotton, and as that is exactly what it 
looks like, it is again so described. The balls 
of cotton did not seem to rise from the earth, 
but to pop suddenly out of the sky. 

A moment later five more cotton balls 
popped out of the sky. They were much 
nearer the aeroplane. Others followed, leap- 
ing after it like the spray of succeeding 
waves. But the aeroplane steadily and 
swiftly conveyed itself out of range and out 
of sight. 

To say where the trenches began and 
where they ended is difficult. We were pass- 
ing through land that had been retrieved 
from the enemy. It has been fought for inch 
by inch, foot by foot. To win it back thou- 
sands of lives had been thrown like dice upon 

40 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

a table. There were vast stretches of mud, 
of fields once cultivated, but now scarred 
with pits, trenches, rusty barbed wires. The 
roads were rivers of clay. They were lined 
with dugouts, cellars, and caves. These bur- 
rows in the earth were supported by beams, 
and suggested a shaft in a disused mine. 
They looked like the tunnels to coal-pits. 
They were inhabited by a race of French 
unknown to the boulevards — men, bearded, 
deeply tanned, and caked with clay. Their 
uniforms were like those of football players 
on a rainy day at the end of the first half. 
We were entering what had been the village 
of Ablain, and before us rose the famous 
heights of Mont de Lorette. To scale these 
heights seemed a feat as incredible as scaling 
our Palisades or the sheer cliff of Gibraltar. 
But they had been scaled, and the side to- 
ward us was crawling with French soldiers, 
climbing to the trenches, descending from 
the trenches, carrying to the trenches food, 
ammunition, and fuel for the fires. 

41 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

A cold rain was falling and had turned the 
streets of Ablain and all the roads to it into 
swamps. In these were islands of bricks 
and lakes of water of the solidity and color 
of melted chocolate. Whatever you touched 
clung to you. It was a land of mud, clay, 
liquid earth. A cold wind whipped the rain 
against your face and chilled you to the 
bone. All you saw depressed and chilled 
your spirit. 

To the "poilus," who, in the face of such 
desolation, joked and laughed with the civil- 
ians, you felt you owed an apology, for your 
automobile was waiting to whisk you back 
to a warm dinner, electric lights, red wine, 
and a dry bed. The men we met were cave- 
men. When night came they would sleep 
in a hole in the hill fit for a mud-turtle or a 
muskrat. 

They moved in streets of clay two feet 
across. They were as far removed from civili- 
zation, as in the past they have known it, as 
though they had been cast adrift upon an 

42 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

island of liquid mud. Wherever they looked 
was desolation, ruins, and broken walls, jum- 
bles of bricks, tunnels in mud, caves in mud, 
graves in mud. 

In other wars the "front" was something 
almost human. It advanced, wavered, and 
withdrew. At a single bugle-call it was elec- 
trified. It remained in no fixed place, but, 
like a wave, enveloped a hill, or with gallop- 
ing horses and cheering men overwhelmed a 
valley. In comparison, this trench work did 
not suggest war. Rather it reminded you of 
a mining-camp during the spring freshet, 
and for all the attention the cavemen paid 
to them, the reports of their "seventy-fives" 
and the "Jack Johnsons" of the enemy 
bursting on Mont de Lorette might have 
come from miners blasting rock. 

What we saw of these cave-dwellers was 
only a few feet of a moat that for three hun- 
dred miles like a miniature canal is cut across 
France. Where we stood we could see of the 
three hundred miles only mud walls, so close 

43 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

that we brushed one with each elbow. By 
looking up we could see the black, leaden 
sky. Ahead of us the trench twisted, and an 
arrow pointed to a first-aid dressing-station. 
Behind us was the winding entrance to a shel- 
ter deep in the earth, reinforced by cement 
and corrugated iron, and lit by a candle. 

From a trench that was all we could see of 
the war, and that is all millions of fighting 
men see of it — wet walls of clay as narrow as 
a grave, an arrow pointing to a hospital, 
earthen steps leading to a shelter from sud- 
den death, and overhead the rain-soaked sky 
and perhaps a great bird at which the enemy 
is shooting snowballs. 

In northern France there are many buried 
towns and villages. They are buried in their 
own cellars. Arras is still uninterred. She 
is the corpse of a city that waits for burial, 
and day by day the German shells are try- 
ing to dig her grave. They were at it yes- 
terday when we visited Arras, and this morn- 
ing they will be hammering her again. 

44 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

Seven centuries before this war Arras was 
famous for her tapestries, so famous that in 
England a piece of tapestry was called an 
arras. Now she has given her name to a bat- 
tle — to different battles — that began with 
the great bombardment of October a year 
ago, and each day since then have continued. 
On one single day, June 26, the Germans 
threw into the city shells in all sizes, from 
three to sixteen inches, and to the number 
of ten thousand. That was about one for 
each house. 

This bombardment drove 2,700 inhabitants 
into exile, of whom 1,200 have now returned. 
The army feeds them, and in response they 
have opened shops that the shells have not 
already opened, and supply the soldiers with 
tobacco, post -cards, and from those gardens 
not hidden under bricks and cement, fruit 
and vegetables. In the deserted city these 
civilians form an inconspicuous element. 
You can walk for great distances and see 
none of them. When they do appear in the 

45 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

empty streets they are like ghosts. Every 
day the shells change one or two of them into 
real ghosts. But the others still stay on. 
With the dogs nosing among the fallen bricks, 
and the pigeons on the ruins of the cathe- 
dral, they know no other home. 

As we entered Arras the silence fell like a 
sudden change of temperature. It was actual 
and menacing. Every corner seemed to 
threaten an ambush. Our voices echoed so 
loudly that unconsciously we spoke in lower 
tones. The tap of the captain's walking- 
stick resounded like the blow of a hammer. 
The emptiness and stillness was like that of a 
vast cemetery, and the grass that had grown 
through the paving-stones deadened the 
sound of our steps. This silence was broken 
only by the barking of the French seventy- 
fives, in parts of the city hidden to us, the 
boom of the German guns in answer, and 
from overhead by the aeroplanes. In the ab- 
solute stillness the whirl of their engines came 
to us with the steady vibrations of a loom. 

46 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

In the streets were shell holes that had been 
recently filled and covered over with bricks 
and fresh earth. It was like walking upon 
newly made graves. On either side of us 
were gaping cellars into which the houses had 
dumped themselves or, still balancing above 
them, were walls prettily papered, hung with 
engravings, paintings, mirrors, quite intact. 
These walls were roofless and defenseless 
against the rain and snow. Other houses 
were like those toy ones built for children, 
with the front open. They showed a bed with 
pillows, shelves supporting candles, books, a 
washstand with basin and pitcher, a piano, 
and a reading-lamp. 

In one house four stories had been torn 
away, leaving only the attic sheltered by 
the peaked roof. To that height no one 
could climb, and exposed to view were the 
collection of trunks and boxes familiar to 
all attics. As a warning against rough han- 
dling, one of these, a woman's hat-box, had 
been marked "Fragile." Secure and serene, 

47 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

it smiled down sixty feet upon the mass of 
iron and bricks it had survived. 

Of another house the roof only remained; 
from under it the rest of the building had 
been shot away. It was as though after a 
soldier had been blown to pieces, his helmet 
still hung suspended in mid-air. 

In other streets it was the front that was 
intact, but when our captain opened the 
street door we faced a cellar. Nothing be- 
side remained. Or else we stepped upon 
creaky floors that sagged, through rooms 
swept by the iron brooms into vast dust 
heaps. From these protruded wounded furni- 
ture — the leg of a table, the broken arm of a 
chair, a headless statue. 

From the debris we picked the many little 
heirlooms, souvenirs, possessions that make 
a home. Photographs with written inscrip- 
tions, post-cards bearing good wishes, orna- 
ments for the centre-table, ornaments for 
the person, images of the church, all crushed, 
broken, and stained. Many shop-windows 
were still dressed invitingly as they were 

48 




From a photograph by R. H. Davis. 

" Of another house the roof only remained, from under it the rest of 
the building had been shot away." 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

when the shell burst, but beyond the goods 
exposed for sale was only a deep hole. 

The pure deviltry of a shell no one can 
explain. Nor why it spares a looking-glass 
and wrecks a wall that has been standing 
since the twelfth century. 

In the cathedral the stone roof weighing 
hundreds of tons had fallen, and directly be- 
neath where it had been hung an enormous 
glass chandelier untouched. A shell loves 
a shining mark. To what is most beautiful 
it is most cruel. The Hotel de Ville, which 
was counted among the most presentable 
in the north of France, that once rose in seven 
arches in the style of the Renaissance, the 
shells marked for their own. 

And all the houses approaching it from 
the German side they destroyed. Not even 
those who once lived in them could say 
where they stood. There is left only a mess 
of bricks, tiles, and plaster. They suggest 
the homes of human beings as little as does 
a brickyard. 

We visited what had been the head- 
49 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

quarters of General de Wignacourt. They 
were in the garden of a house that opened 
upon one of the principal thoroughfares, 
and the floor level was twelve feet under 
the level of the flower-beds. To this sub- 
terranean office there are two entrances, one 
through the cellar of the house, the other 
down steps from the garden. The steps 
were beams the size of a railroad-tie. Had 
they not been whitewashed they would look 
like the shaft leading to a coal-pit. 

A soldier who was an artist in plaster had 
decorated the entrance to the shaft with an 
ornamental facade worthy of any public 
building. Here, secure from the falling walls 
and explosive shells, the general by tele- 
phone directed his attack. The place was 
as dry, as clean, and as compact as the ad- 
miral's quarters on a ship of war. The 
switchboard connected with batteries buried 
from sight in every part of the unburied 
city, and in an adjoining room a soldier cook 
was preparing a most appetizing luncheon. 

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THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

Above us was three yards of cement, 
rafters, and earth, and crowning them grass 
and flowers. When the owner of the house 
returns he will find this addition to his resi- 
dence an excellent refuge from burglars or 
creditors. 

Personally we were glad to escape into 
the open street. Between being hit by a 
shell and buried under twelve feet of cement 
the choice was difficult. 

We lunched in a charming house, where 
the table was spread in the front hall. The 
bed of the officer temporarily occupying the 
house also was spread in the hall, and we were 
curious to know, but too proud to ask, why 
he limited himself to such narrow quarters. 
Our captain rewarded our reticence. He 
threw back the heavy curtain that con- 
cealed the rest of the house, and showed us 
that there was no house. It had been deftly 
removed by a shell. 

The owner of the house had run away, but 
before he fled, fearing the Germans might 

Si 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

enter Arras and take his money, he had with- 
drawn it and hidden it in his garden. The 
money amounted to two hundred and fifty 
thousand dollars. He placed it in a lead 
box, soldered up the opening, and buried the 
box under a tree. Then he went away and 
carelessly forgot which tree. 

During a lull in the bombardment, he re- 
turned, and until two o'clock in the morn- 
ing dug frantically for his buried treasure. 
The soldier who guarded the house told me 
the difference in the way the soldiers dig a 
trench and the way our absent host dug for 
his lost money was greatly marked. I found 
the leaden box cast aside in the dog-kennel. 
It was the exact size of a suitcase. As none 
of us knows when he may not have to bury 
a quarter of a million dollars hurriedly, it 
is a fact worth remembering. Any ordinary 
suitcase will do. The soldier and I examined 
the leaden box carefully. But the owner 
had not overlooked anything. 

When we reached the ruins of the cathedral, 
52 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

we did not need darkness and falling rain to 
depress us further, or to make the scene 
more desolate. One lacking in all reverence 
would have been shocked. The wanton 
waste, the senseless brutality in such de- 
struction would have moved a statue. Walls 
as thick as the ramparts of a fort had been 
blown into powdered chalk. There were 
great breaches in them through which you 
could drive an omnibus. In one place the 
stone roof and supporting arches had fallen, 
and upon the floor, where for two hundred 
years the people of Arras had knelt in prayer, 
was a mighty barricade of stone blocks, 
twisted candelabra, broken praying-chairs, 
torn vestments, shattered glass. Exposed 
to the elements, the chapels were open to 
the sky. The rain fell on sacred emblems 
of the Holy Family, the saints, and apostles. 
Upon the altars the dust of the crushed 
walls lay inches deep. 

The destruction is too great for present 
repair. They can fill the excavations in the 

S3 



THE MUD TRENCHES OF ARTOIS 

streets and board up the shattered show- 
windows, but the cathedral is too vast, the 
destruction of it too nearly complete. The 
sacrilege must stand. Until the war is over, 
until Arras is free from shells, the ruins must 
remain uncared for and uncovered. And 
the cathedral, by those who once came to 
it for help and guidance, will be deserted. 

But not entirely deserted. The pigeons 
that built their nests under the eaves have 
descended to the empty chapels, and in 
swift, graceful circles sweep under the ruined 
arches. Above the dripping of the rain, 
and the surly booming of the cannon, their 
contented cooing was the only sound of 
comfort. It seemed to hold out a promise 
for the better days of peace. 



54 



CHAPTER III 

THE ZIGZAG FRONT OF CHAMPAGNE 

Paris, October, 191 5. 

IN Artois we were "personally conducted.' ' 
In a way, we were the guests of the war 
department; in any case, we tried to behave 
as such. It was no more proper for us to 
see what we were not invited to see than to 
bring our own wine to another man's dinner. 
In Champagne it was entirely different. 
I was alone with a car and a chauffeur and 
a blue slip of paper. It permitted me to re- 
main in a "certain place" inside the war 
zone for ten days. I did not believe it was 
true. I recalled other trips over the same 
roads a year before which finally led to the 
Cherche-Midi prison, and each time I showed 
the blue slip to the gendarmes I shivered. 
But the gendarmes seemed satisfied, and as 
they permitted us to pass farther and farther 

55 



THE ZIGZAG FRONT 

into the forbidden land, the chauffeur began 
to treat me almost as an equal. And so, 
with as little incident as one taxis from 
Madison Square to Central Park, we mo- 
tored from Paris into the sound of the guns. 

At the "certain place" the general was 
absent in the trenches, but the chief of staff 
asked what I most wanted to see. It was as 
though the fairy godmother had given you 
one wish. I chose Rheims, and to spend 
the night there. The chief of staff waved a 
wand in the shape of a second piece of pa- 
per, and we were in Rheims. To a colonel 
we presented the two slips of paper, and, in 
turn, he asked what was wanted. A year 
before I had seen the cathedral when it was 
being bombarded, when it still was burning. 
I asked if I might revisit it. 

"And after that?" said the colonel. 

It was much too good to be real. 

I would wake and find myself again in 
Cherche-Midi prison. 

Outside, the sounds of the guns were now 



OF CHAMPAGNE 

very close. They seemed to be just around 
the corner, on the roof of the next house. 

"Of course, what I really want is to visit 
the first trench." 

It was like asking a Mason to reveal the 
mysteries of his order, a priest to tell the 
secrets of the confessional. The colonel com- 
manded the presence of Lieutenant Blank. 
With alarm I awaited his coming. Did a 
military prison yawn, and was he to act as 
my escort? I had been too bold. -. I should 
have asked to see only the third trench. 

At the order the colonel gave, Lieutenant 
Blank expressed surprise. But his colonel, 
with a shrug, as though ridding himself of 
all responsibility, showed the blue slip. It 
was a pantomime, with which by repeti- 
tion, we became familiar. In turn each offi- 
cer would express surprise; the other officer 
would shrug, point to the blue slip, and we 
would pass forward. 

The cathedral did not long detain us. 
Outside, for protection, it was boarded up, 

57 



THE ZIGZAG FRONT 

packed tightly in sand-bags; inside, it had 
been swept of broken glass, and the paint- 
ings, tapestries, and the carved images on 
the altars had been removed. A professional 
sacristan spoke a set speech, telling me of 
things I had seen with my own eyes — of 
burning rafters that spared the Gobelin 
tapestries, of the priceless glass trampled 
underfoot, of the dead and wounded Ger- 
mans lying in the straw that had given the 
floor the look of a barn. Now it is as empty 
of decoration as the Pennsylvania railroad- 
station in New York. It is a beautiful shell 
waiting for the day to come when the candles 
will be relit, when the incense will toss before 
the altar, and the gray walls glow again with 
the colors of tapestries and paintings. The 
windows only will not bloom as before. The 
glass destroyed by the Emperor's shells, all 
the king's horses and all the king's men can- 
not restore. 

The professional guide, who is already so 
professional that he is exchanging German 

58 



OF CHAMPAGNE 

cartridges for tips, supplied a morbid detail 
of impossible bad taste. Among the German 
wounded there was a major (I remember de- 
scribing him a year ago as looking like a 
college professor) who, when the fire came, 
was one of these the priests could not save, 
and who was burned alive. Marks on the 
gray surface of a pillar against which he re- 
clined and grease spots on the stones of the 
floor are supposed to be evidences of his 
end, a torture brought upon him by the 
shells of his own people. Mr. Kipling has 
written that there are many who "hope and 
pray these signs will be respected by our 
children's children." Mr. Kipling's hope 
shows an imperfect conception of the pur- 
poses of a cathedral. It is a house dedicated 
to God, and on earth to peace and good-will 
among men. It is not erected to teach gen- 
erations of little children to gloat over the 
fact that an enemy, even a German officer, 
was by accident burned alive. 
Personally, I feel the sooner those who 
59 



THE ZIGZAG FRONT 

introduced "f rightfulness" to France, Bel- 
gium, and the coasts of England are hunted 
down and destroyed the better. But the 
stone-mason should get to work, and remove 
those stains from the Rheims cathedral. 
Instead, for our children's children, would 
not a tablet to Edith Cavell be better, or 
one to the French priest, Abbe Thinot, who 
carried the wounded Germans from the burn- 
ing cathedral, and who later, while carrying 
French wounded from the field of battle, was 
himself hit three times, and of his wounds 
died? 

I hinted to the lieutenant that the cathe- 
dral would remain for some time, but that 
the trenches would soon be ploughed into 
turnip-beds. 

So, we moved toward the trenches. The 
officer commanding them lived in what he 
described as the deck of a battleship sunk 
underground. It was a happy simile. He 
had his conning-tower, in which, with a tele- 
scope through a slit in a steel plate, he could 

60 



OF CHAMPAGNE 

sweep the countryside. He had a fire-control 
station, executive offices, wardroom, cook's 
galley, his own cabin, equipped with tele- 
phones, electric lights, and running water. 
There was a carpet on the floor, a gay cover- 
let on the four-poster bed, photographs on his 
dressing-table, and flowers. All of these were 
buried deep underground. A puzzling detail 
was a perfectly good brass lock and key on 
his door. I asked if it were to keep out shells 
or burglars. And he explained that the door 
with the lock in tact had been blown off its 
hinges in a house of which no part was now 
standing. He had borrowed it, as he had 
borrowed everything else in the subterranean 
war-ship, from the near-by ruins. 

He was an extremely light-hearted and 
courteous host, but he frowned suspiciously 
when he asked if I knew a correspondent 
named Senator Albert Beveridge. I hastily 
repudiated Beveridge. I knew him not, I 
said, as a correspondent, but as a politician 
who possibly had high hopes of the German 

61 



THE ZIGZAG FRONT 

vote. "He dined with us," said the colonel, 
"and then wrote against France." I sug- 
gested it was at their own risk if they wel- 
comed those who already had been with the 
Germans, and who had been received by the 
German Emperor. This is no war for neutrals. 

Then began a walk of over a mile through 
an open drain. The walls were of chalk as 
hard as flint. Unlike the mud trenches in 
Artois, there were no slides to block the 
miniature canal. It was as firm and compact 
as a whitewashed stone cell. From the main 
drain on either side ran other drains, cul-de- 
sacs, cellars, trap-doors, and ambushes. Over- 
head hung balls of barbed wire that, should 
the French troops withdraw, could be dropped 
and so block the trench behind them. If you 
raised your head they playfully snatched off 
your cap. It was like ducking under innu- 
merable bridges of live wires. 

The drain opened at last into a wrecked 
town. Its ruins were complete. It made 
Pompeii look like a furnished flat. The 

62 



OF CHAMPAGNE 

officer of the day joined us here, and to him 
the lieutenant resigned the post of guide. 
My new host wore a steel helmet, and at his 
belt dangled a mask against gas. He led us 
to the end of what had been a street, and 
which was now barricaded with huge tim- 
bers, steel doors, like those to a gambling 
house, intricate cat's cradles of wire, and 
solid steel plates. 

To go back seemed the only way open. 
But the officer in the steel cap dived through 
a slit in the iron girders, and as he disap- 
peared, beckoned. I followed down a well 
that dropped straight into the very bowels 
of the earth. It was very dark, and only 
crosspieces of wood offered a slippery foot- 
ing. Into the darkness, with hands pressed 
against the well, and with feet groping for the 
log steps, we tobogganed down, down, down. 
We turned into a tunnel, and, by the slant 
of the ground, knew we were now mounting. 
There was a square of sunshine, and we walked 
out, and into a graveyard. It was like a dark 

63 



THE ZIGZAG FRONT 

change in a theatre. The last scene had been 
the ruins of a town, a gate like those of the 
Middle Ages, studded with bolts, reinforced 
with steel plates, guarded by men-at-arms 
in steel casques, and then the dark change 
into a graveyard, with grass and growing 
flowers, gravel walks, and hedges. 

The graves were old, the monuments and 
urns above them moss-covered, but one was 
quite new, and the cross above it said that 
it was the grave of a German aviator. As 
they passed it the French officers saluted. 
We entered a trench as straight as the let- 
ter Z. And at each twist and turn we were 
covered by an eye in a steel door. An at- 
tacking party advancing would have had as 
much room in which to dodge that eye as 
in a bath-tub. One man with his magazine 
rifle could have halted a dozen. And when 
in the newspapers you read that one man 
has captured twenty prisoners, he probably 
was looking at them through the peep-hole 
in one of those steel doors. 

64 



OF CHAMPAGNE 

We zigzagged into a cellar, and below the 
threshold of some one's front door. The 
trench led directly under it. The house into 
which the door had opened was destroyed; 
possibly those who once had entered by it 
also were destroyed, and it now swung in 
air with men crawling like rats below it, its 
half -doors banging and groaning; the wind, 
with ghostly fingers, opening them to no one, 
closing them on nothing. The trench wriggled 
through a garden, and we could see flung 
across the narrow strip of sky above us, the 
branch of an apple-tree, and with one shoulder 
brushed the severed roots of the same tree. 
Then the trench led outward, and we passed 
beneath railroad tracks, the ties reposing on 
air, and supported by, instead of supporting, 
the iron rails. 

We had been moving between garden 
walls, cellar walls; sometimes hidden by 
ruins, sometimes diving like moles into tun- 
nels. We remained on no one level, or for 
any time continued in any one direction. 

65 



THE ZIGZAG FRONT 

It was entirely fantastic, entirely unreal. 
It was like visiting a new race of beings, who 
turn day into night; who, like bats, mo- 
lochs, and wolves, hide in caves and shun 
the sunlight. 

By the ray of an electric torch we saw 
where these underground people store their 
food. Where, against siege, are great casks 
of water, dungeons packed with ammuni- 
tion, more dungeons, more ammunition. We 
saw, always by the shifting, pointing finger 
of the electric torch, sleeping quarters under- 
ground, dressing stations for the wounded 
underground. In niches at every turn were 
gas-extinguishers. They were as many, as 
much as a matter of course, as fire-extin- 
guishers in a modern hotel. They were ex- 
actly like those machines advertised in seed 
catalogues for spraying fruit-trees. They 
are worn on the back like a knapsack. 
Through a short rubber hose a fluid attacks 
and dissipates the poison gases. 

The sun set, and we proceeded in the light 
66 



OF CHAMPAGNE 

of a full moon. It needed only this to give 
to our journey the unreality of a nightmare. 
Long since I had lost all sense of direction. 
It was not only a maze and labyrinth, but 
it held to no level. At times, concealed by 
walls of chalk, we walked erect, and then, 
like woodchucks, dived into earthen bur- 
rows. For a long distance we crawled, bend- 
ing double through a tunnel. At intervals 
lamps, as yet unlit, protruded from either 
side, and to warn us of these from the dark- 
ness a voice would call, "attention a gauche," 
"attention a droite" The air grew foul and 
the pressure on the ear-drums like that of 
the subway under the North River. We 
came out and drew deep breaths as though 
we had been long under water. 

We were in the first trench. It was, at 
places, from three hundred to forty yards 
distant from the Germans. No one spoke, 
or only in whispers. The moonlight turned 
the men at arms into ghosts. Their silence 
added to their unreality. I felt like Rip 

6 7 



THE ZIGZAG FRONT 

Van Winkle hemmed in by the goblin crew 
of Hendrik Hudson. From somewhere near 
us, above or below, to the right or left the 
"seventy-fives," as though aroused by the 
moon, began like terriers to bark viciously. 
The officer in the steel casque paused to 
listen, fixed their position, and named them. 
How he knew where they were, how he knew 
where he was himself, was all part of the 
mystery. Rats, jet black in the moonlight, 
scurried across the open places, scrambled 
over our feet, ran boldly between them. 
We had scared them, perhaps, but not half 
so badly as they scared me. 

We pushed on past sentinels, motionless, 
silent, fatefully awake. The moonlight had 
turned their blue uniforms white and flashed 
on their steel helmets. They were like men 
in armor, and so still that only when you 
brushed against them, cautiously as men 
change places in a canoe, did you feel they 
were alive. At times, one of them thinking 
something in the gardens of barb wire had 

68 



OF CHAMPAGNE 

moved, would loosen his rifle, and there 
would be a flame and flare of red, and then 
again silence, the silence of the hunter stalk- 
ing a wild beast, of the officer of the law, 
gun in hand, waiting for the breathing of 
the burglar to betray his presence. 

The next morning I called to make my 
compliments to General Franchet d'Esperay. 
He was a splendid person — as alert as a 
steel lance. He demanded what I had seen. 

"Nothing!" he protested. "You have 
seen nothing. When you return from Serbia, 
come to Champagne again and I myself 
will show you something of interest.' ' 

I am curious to see what he calls "some- 
thing of interest." 

"I wonder what's happening in Buffalo?" 

There promised to be a story for some one 
to write a year after the war. It would tell 
how quickly Champagne recovered from the 
invasion of the Germans. But one need not 
wait until after the war. The story can be 
written now. 

69 



THE ZIGZAG FRONT 

We know that the enemy was thrown back 
across the Aisne. 

We know that the enemy drove the French 
and English before him until at the Forest 
of Montmorency, the Hun was within ten and 
at Claye within fifteen miles of Paris. 

But to-day, by any outward evidence, he 
would have a hard time to prove it. And 
that is not because when he advanced he 
was careful not to tramp on the grass or to 
pick the flowers. He did not obey even the 
warnings to automobilists: "Attention les 
enfants!" 

On the contrary, as he came, he threw 
before him thousands of tons of steel and 
iron. Like a cyclone he uprooted trees, 
unroofed houses; like a tidal wave he ex- 
cavated roads that had been built by the 
Romans, swept away walls, and broke the 
backs of stone bridges that for hundreds of 
years had held their own against swollen 
rivers. 

A year ago I followed the German in his 
70 




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<D c3 



s 1 

I! 



OF CHAMPAGNE 

retreat from Claye through Meaux, Chateau 
Thierry to Soissons, where, on the east bank 
of the Aisne, I watched the French artillery 
shell his guns on the hills opposite. The 
French then were hot upon his heels. In one 
place they had not had time to remove even 
their own dead, and to avoid the bodies in 
the open road the car had to twist and turn. 

Yesterday, coming back to Paris from the 
trenches that guard Rheims, I covered the 
same road. But it was not the same. It 
seemed that I must surely have lost the 
way. Only the iron signs at the crossroads, 
and the map used the year before and scarred 
with my own pencil marks, were evidences 
that again I was following mile by mile and 
foot by foot the route of that swift advance 
and riotous retreat. 

A year before the signs of the retreat were 
the road itself, the houses facing it, and a 
devastated countryside. You knew then, 
that, of these signs, some would at once be 
effaced. They had to be effaced, for they 

7i 



THE ZIGZAG FRONT 

were polluting the air. But until the vil- 
lagers returned to their homes, or to what 
remained of their homes, the bloated car- 
casses of horses blocked the road, the bodies 
of German soldiers, in death mercifully un- 
like anything human and as unreal as fallen 
scarecrows, sprawled in the fields. 

But while you knew these signs of the 
German raid would be removed, other signs 
were scars that you thought would be long 
in healing. These were the stone arches 
and buttresses of the bridges, dynamited 
and dumped into the mud of the Marne and 
Ourcq, chateaux and villas with the roof 
torn away as deftly as with one hand you 
could rip off the lid of a cigar-box, or with 
a wall blown in, or out, in either case ex- 
posing indecently the owner's bedroom, his 
wife's boudoir, the children's nursery. 

Other signs of the German were villages 
with houses wrecked, the humble shops 
sacked, garden walls levelled, fields of beets 
and turnips uprooted by his shells, or where 

72 



OF CHAMPAGNE 

he had snatched sleep in the trampled mud, 
strewn with demolished haystacks, vast trees 
split clean in half as though by lightning, 
or with nothing remaining but the splintered 
stump. That was the picture of the roads 
and countryside in the triangle of Soissons, 
Rheims, and Meaux, as it was a year ago. 

And I expected to see the wake of that 
great retreat still marked by ruins and dev- 
astation. 

But I had not sufficiently trusted to the 
indomitable spirit of the French, in their 
intolerance of waste, their fierce, yet or- 
dered energy. 

To-day the fields are cultivated up to the 
very butts of the French batteries. They 
are being put to bed, and tucked in for the 
long winter sleep. For miles the furrows 
stretch over the fields in unbroken lines. 
Ploughs, not shells, have drawn them. 

They are gray with fertilizers, strewn 
with manure; the swiftly dug trenches of a 
year ago have given way to the peaked 

73 



THE ZIGZAG FRONT 

mounds in which turnips wait transplanting. 
Where there were vast stretches of mud, 
scarred with intrenchments, with the wheel 
tracks of guns and ammunition carts, with 
stale, ill-smelling straw, the carcasses of oxen 
and horses, and the bodies of men, is now a 
smiling landscape, with miles of growing 
grain, green vegetables, green turf. 

In Champagne the French spirit and na- 
ture, working together, have wiped out the 
signs of the German raid. It is as though 
it had never been. You begin to believe it 
was only a bad dream, an old wife's tale to 
frighten children. 

The car moved slowly, but, look no matter 
how carefully, it was most difficult to find 
the landfalls I remembered. 

Near Feret Milton there was a chateau 
with a lawn that ran to meet the Paris road. 
It had been used as a German emergency 
hospital, and previously by them as an out- 
post. The long windows to the terrace had 
been wrecked, the terrace was piled high with 

74 



OF CHAMPAGNE 

blood-stained uniforms, hundreds of boots 
had been tossed from an upper story that 
had been used as an operating-room, and 
mixed with these evidences of disaster were 
monuments of empty champagne-bottles. 

That was the picture I remembered. Yes- 
terday, like a mantle of moss, the lawn swept 
to the road, the long windows had been re- 
placed and hung with yellow silk, and, on 
the terrace, where I had seen the blood- 
stained uniforms, a small boy, maybe the 
son and heir of the chateau, with hair flying 
and bare legs showing, was joyfully riding a 
tricycle. 

Neufchelles I remembered as a village 
completely wrecked and inhabited only by 
a very old man, and a cat, that, as though 
for company, stalked behind him. 

But to-day Neufchelles is a thriving, con- 
tented, commonplace town. Splashes of 
plaster, less weather-stained than the plaster 
surrounding them, are the only signs remain- 
ing of the explosive shells. The stone-mason 

75 



THE ZIGZAG FRONT 

and the plasterer have obliterated the work 
of the guns, the tiny shops have been refilled, 
the tide of life has flowed back, and in the 
streets the bareheaded women, their shoul- 
ders wrapped in black woollen shawls, gather 
to gossip, or, with knitting in hand, call to 
each other from the doorways. 

There was the stable of a large villa in 
which I had seen five fine riding-horses 
lying on the stones, each with a bullet-hole 
over his temple. In the retreat they had 
been destroyed to prevent the French using 
them as remounts. 

This time, as we passed the same stable- 
yard, fresh horses looked over the half-doors, 
the lofts were stuffed with hay; in the corner, 
against the coming of winter, were piled 
many cords of wood, and rival chanticleers, 
with their harems, were stalking proudly 
around the stable-yard, pecking at the scat- 
tered grain. It was a picture of comfort 
and content. It continued like that all the 
way. 

7 6 



OF CHAMPAGNE 

Even the giant poplars that line the road 
for four miles out of Meaux to the west, 
and that had been split and shattered, are 
now covered with autumn foliage, the scars 
are overgrown and by doctor nature the raw 
spots have been cauterized and have healed. 

The stone bridges, that at Meaux and be- 
yond the Chateau Thierry sprawled in the 
river, again have been reared in air. People 
have already forgotten that a year ago to 
reach Soissons from Meaux the broken bridges 
forced them to make a detour of fifty miles. 

The lesson of it is that the French people 
have no time to waste upon post mortems. 
With us, fifty years after the event, there 
are those who still talk of Sherman's raid 
through Columbia, who are so old that they 
hum hymns of hate about it. How much 
wiser, how much more proud, is the village 
of Neufchelles ! 

Not fifty, but only one year has passed 
since the Germans wrecked Neufchelles, and 
already it has been rebuilt and repopulated 

77 



THE ZIGZAG FRONT OF CHAMPAGNE 

— not after the war has for half a century 
been at an end, but while war still endures, 
while it is but twenty miles distant! What 
better could illustrate the spirit of France 
or better foretell her final victory? 



78 



CHAPTER IV 
FROM PARIS TO THE PIILEUS 

Athens, November, 191 5. 

AT home we talk glibly of a world war. 
>■ But beyond speculating in munitions 
and as to how many Americans will be killed 
by the next submarine, and how many notes 
the President will write about it, we hardly 
appreciate that this actually is a war of the 
world, that all over the globe, every ship 
of state, even though it may be trying to 
steer a straight course, is being violently 
rocked by it. Even the individual, as he 
moves from country to country, is rocked 
by it, not violently, but continuously. It is 
in loss of time and money he feels it most. 
And as he travels, he learns, as he cannot 
learn from a map, how far-reaching are the 
ramifications of this war, in how many dif- 
ferent ways it affects every one. He soon 

79 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIRAEUS 

comes to accept whatever happens as directly- 
due to the war — even when the deck stew- 
ard tells him he cannot play shuffle-board be- 
cause, owing to the war, there is no chalk. 

In times of peace to get to this city from 
Paris did not require more than six days, 
but now, owing to the war, in making the 
distance we wasted fifteen. That is not 
counting the time in Paris required by the 
police to issue the passport, without which 
no one can leave France. At the prefecture 
of police I found a line of people — French, 
Italians, Americans, English — in columns of 
four and winding through gloomy halls, down 
dark stairways, and out into the street. I 
took one look at the line and fled to Mr. 
Thackara, our consul-general, and, thanks 
to him, was not more than an hour in obtain- 
ing my laisser-passer. The police assured 
me I might consider myself fortunate, as 
the time they usually spent in preparing a 
passport was two days. It was still neces- 
sary to obtain a vise from the Italian con- 

80 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

sulate permitting me to enter Italy, from 
the Greek consulate to enter Greece, and, as 
my American passport said nothing of Ser- 
bia, from Mr. Thackara two more vises, 
one to get out of France, and another to in- 
vade Serbia. Thanks to the war, in obtain- 
ing all these autographs two more days 
were wasted. In peace times one had only 
to go to Cook's and buy a ticket. In those 
days there was no more delay than in reserv- 
ing a seat for the theatre. 

War followed us south. The windows of 
the wagon-lit were plastered with warnings 
to be careful, to talk to no strangers; that 
the enemy was listening. War had invaded 
even Aix-les-Bains, most lovely of summer 
pleasure-grounds. As we passed, it was 
wrapped in snow; the Cat's Tooth, that 
towers between Aixe and Chambery, and 
that lifts into the sky a great cross two hun- 
dred feet in height, was all white, the pine- 
trees around the lake were white, the streets 
were white, the Casino des Fleurs, the Cercle, 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

the hotels. And above each of them, where 
once was only good music, good wines, beau- 
tiful flowers, and baccarat, now droop innu- 
merable Red Cross flags. Against the snow- 
covered hills they were like little splashes of 
blood. 

War followed us into Italy. But from the 
war as one finds it in England and France it 
differed. Perhaps we were too far west, but 
except for the field uniforms of green and 
the new scabbards of gun-metal, and, at 
Turin, four aeroplanes in the air at the same 
time, you might not have known that Italy 
was one of the Allies. For one thing, you 
saw no wounded. Again, perhaps, it was 
because we were too far south and west, and 
that the fighting in Tyrol is concentrated. 
But Bordeaux is farther from the battle-line 
of France than is Naples from the Italian 
front, and the multitudes of wounded in 
Bordeaux, the multitudes of women in black 
in Bordeaux, make one of the most appalling, 
most significant pictures of this war. In 

82 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

two days in Naples I did not see one wounded 
man. But I saw many Germans and Ger- 
man signs, and no one had scratched Mumm 
off the wine-card. A country that is one of 
the Allies, and yet not at war with Germany, 
cannot be taken very seriously. Indeed, in 
England the War Office staff speak of the 
Italian communiques as the "weather re- 
ports." 

In Naples the foreigners accuse Italy of 
running with the hare and the hounds. 
They asked what is her object in keeping on 
friendly terms with the bitterest enemy of 
the Allies. Is there an understanding that 
after the war she and Germany will together 
carve slices off of Austria? Whatever her 
ulterior object may be, her present war 
spirit does not impress the visitor. It is not 
the spirit of France and England. One man 
said to me: "Why can't you keep the Italian- 
Americans in America? Over there they 
earn money, and send millions of it to Italy. 
When they come here to fight, not only that 

83 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

money stops, but we have to feed and pay 
them." 

It did not sound grateful. Nor as though 
Italy were seriously at war. You do not find 
France and England, or Germany, grudging 
the man who returns to fight for his country 
his rations and pay. And Italy pays her 
soldiers five cents a day. Many of the 
reservists and volunteers from America who 
answered the call to arms are bitterly disap- 
pointed. It was their hope to be led at once 
to the firing-line. Instead, after six months, 
they are still in camp. The families some 
brought with them are in great need. They 
are not used to living on five cents a day. 
An Italian told me the heaviest drain upon 
the war-relief funds came from the families 
of these Italian-Americans, stranded in their 
own country. He also told me his chief duty 
was to meet them on their arrival. 

"But haven't they money when they ar- 
rive from America?" I asked. 

"That's it," he said naively. "I'm at the 
84 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

wharf to keep their countrymen from rob- 
bing them of it." 

At present in Europe you cannot take 
gold out of any country that is at war. As 
a result, gold is less valuable than paper, 
and when I exchanged my double-eagles for 
paper I lost. 

On the advice of the wisest young banker 
in France I changed, again at a loss, the 
French paper into Bank of England notes. 
But when I arrived in Salonika I found that 
with the Greeks English bank-notes were 
about as popular as English troops, and 
that had I changed my American gold into 
American notes, as was my plan, I would 
have been passing rich. That is what comes 
of associating with bankers. 

At the Italian frontier, a French gentle- 
man had come to the door of the compart- 
ment, raised his hat to the inmates, and 
asked if we had any gold. Forewarned, we 
had not; and, taking our word for it, he 
again raised his hat and disappeared. But, 

85 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

on leaving Naples, it was not like that. In 
these piping times of war your baggage is 
examined when you depart as well as when 
you arrive. You get it coming and going. 
But the Greek steamer was to weigh anchor 
at noon, and at noon all the port officials 
were at dejeuner; so, sooner than wait a 
week for another boat, the passengers went 
on board and carried their bags with them. 
It was unpardonable. It was an affront the 
port officials could not brook. They had 
been disregarded. Their dignity had been 
flouted. What was worse, they had not been 
tipped. Into the dining-saloon of the Greek 
steamer, where we were at luncheon, they 
burst like Barbary pirates. They shrieked, 
they yelled. Nobody knew who they were, 
or what they wanted. Nor did they en- 
lighten us. They only beat upon the tables, 
clanked their swords, and spoiled our lunch. 
Why we were abused, or of what we were 
accused, we could not determine. We 
vaguely recognized our names, and stood 
up, and, while they continued to beat upon 

86 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

the tables, a Greek steward explained they 
wanted our gold. I showed them my bank- 
notes, and was allowed to return to my 
garlic and veal. But the English cigarette 
king, who each week sends some millions of 
cigarettes to the Tommies in the trenches, 
proposed to make a test case of it. 

"I have on me," he whispered, "four 
English sovereigns. I am not taking them 
out of Italy, because until they crossed the 
border in my pocket, they were not in Italy, 
and as I am now leaving Italy, one might 
say they have never been in Italy. It's as 
though they were in bond. I am a British 
subject, and this is not Italian, but British, 
gold. I shall refuse to surrender my four 
sovereigns. I will make it a test case." 

The untipped port officials were still jan- 
gling their swords, so I advised the cigarette 
king to turn in his gold. Even a Greek 
steamer is better than an Italian jail. 

"I will make of it a test case," he re- 
peated. 

"Let George do it," I suggested. 
87 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIRAEUS 

At that moment, in the presence of all 
the passengers, they were searching the per- 
son of another British subject, and an Ally. 
He was one of Lady Paget's units. He was 
in uniform, and, as they ran itching fingers 
over his body, he turned crimson, and the 
rest of us, pretending not to witness his hu- 
miliation, ate ravenously of goat's cheese. 

The cigarette king, breathing defiance, 
repeated: "I will make of it a test case." 

"Better let George do it," I urged. 

And when his name was called, a name 
that is as well known from Kavalla to Smyrna 
in tobacco-fields, sweetmeat shops, palaces, 
and mosques, as at the Ritz and the Gaiety, 
the cigarette king wisely accepted for his 
four sovereigns Italian lire. At their rate of 
exchange, too. 

Later, off Capri, he asked: "When you 
advised me to let George make a test case 
of it, to which of our fellow passengers did 
you refer?" 

In the morning the Adriaticus picked up 
88 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

the landfall of Messina, but, instead of mak- 
ing fast to the quay, anchored her length 
from it. This appeared to be a port regula- 
tion. It enables the boatman to earn a liv- 
ing by charging passengers two francs for a 
round trip of fifty yards. As the wrecked 
city seems to be populated only by boatmen, 
rowing passengers ashore is the chief in- 
dustry. 

The stricken seaport looks as though as 
recently as last week the German army 
had visited it. In France, although war 
still continues, towns wrecked by the Ger- 
mans are already rebuilt. But Messina, 
after four years of peace, is still a ruin. But 
little effort has been made to restore it. 
The post-cards that were printed at the 
moment of the earthquake show her ex- 
actly as she is to-day. With, in the streets, 
no sign of life, with the inhabitants standing 
idle along the quay, shivering in the rain 
and snow, with for a background crumbling 
walls, gaping cellars, and hills buried under 

89 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

acres of fallen masonry, the picture was one 
of terrible desolation, of neglect and inef- 
ficiency. The only structures that had ob- 
viously been erected since the earthquake 
were the "ready-to-wear" shacks sent as 
a stop-gap from America. One should not 
look critically at a gift-house, but they are 
certainly very ugly. In Italy, where every 
spot is a "location" for moving-pictures, 
where the street corners are backgrounds 
for lovers' trysts and assassinations, where 
even poverty is picturesque, and each land- 
scape "composes" into a beautiful and won- 
drous painting, the zinc shacks, in rigid 
lines, like the barracks of a mining-camp, 
came as a shock. 

Sympathetic Americans sent them as only 
a temporary shelter until Messina rose again. 
But it was explained, as there is no rent to 
pay, the Italians, instead of rebuilding, prefer 
to inhabit the ready-to-wear houses. How 
many tourists the mere view of them will 
drive away no one can guess. 

90 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

People who linger in Naples, and by train 
to Reggio join the boat at Messina, never 
admit that they followed that route to 
avoid being seasick. Seasickness is an illness 
of which no one ever boasts. He may take 
pride in saying: "I've an awful cold!" or 
"I've such a headache I can't see!" and 
will expect you to feel sorry. But he knows, 
no matter how horribly he suffers from mal 
de mer, he will receive no sympathy. In 
a Puck and Punch way he will be merely 
comic. So, the passengers who come over 
the side at Messina always have an excuse 
other than that they were dodging the sea. 
It is usually that they lost their luggage at 
Naples and had to search for it. As the 
Italian railroads, which are operated by the 
government, always lose your luggage, it is 
an admirable excuse. So, also, is the one that 
you delayed in order to visit the ruins of Pom- 
peii. The number of people who have visited 
Pompeii solely because the Bay of Naples 
was in an ugly mood will never be counted. 

91 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

Among those who joined at Messina were 
the French princess, who talked American 
much too well to be French, and French far 
too well to be an American, two military- 
attaches, the King's messenger, and the 
Armenian, who was by profession an olive 
merchant, and by choice a manufacturer 
and purveyor of rumors. He was at once 
given an opportunity to exhibit his genius. 
The Italians held up our ship, and would 
not explain why. So the rumor man ex- 
plained. It was because Greece had joined 
the Germans, and Italy had made a prize of 
her. Ten minutes later, he said Greece had 
joined the Allies, and the Italians were hold- 
ing our ship until they could obtain a convoy 
of torpedo-boats. Then it was because two 
submarines were waiting for us outside the 
harbor. Later, it was because the Allies had 
blockaded Greece, and our Greek captain 
would not proceed, not because he was de- 
tained by Italians, but by fear. 

Every time the rumor man appeared in 
92 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

the door of the smoking-room he was wel- 
comed with ironic cheers. But he was not 
discouraged. He would go outside and stand 
in the rain while he hatched a new rumor, 
and then, in great excitement, dash back to 
share it. War levels all ranks, and the pas- 
sengers gathered in the smoking-room play- 
ing solitaire, sipping muddy Turkish coffee, 
and discussing the war in seven languages, and 
everybody smoked — especially the women. 
Finally the military attaches, Sir Thomas 
Cunningham and Lieutenant Boulanger, put 
on the uniforms of their respective countries 
and were rowed ashore to protest. The 
rest of us paced the snow-swept decks and 
gazed gloomily at the wrecked city. Out 
of the fog a boat brought two Sisters of the 
Poor, wrapped in the black cloaks of their 
order. They were petitioners for the poor 
of Messina, and everybody in the smoking- 
room gave them a franc. Because one of 
them was Irish and because it was her fate 
to live in Messina, I gave her ten francs. 

93 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

Meaning to be amiable, she said: "Ah, it 
takes the English to be generous!" 

I said I was Irish. 

The King's messenger looked up from his 
solitaire and, also wishing to be amiable, 
asked: "What's the difference?" 

The Irish sister answered him. 

"Nine francs," she said. 

After we had been prisoners of war for 
twenty-four hours John Bass of the Chicago 
Daily News suggested that if we remained 
longer at Messina our papers would say we 
thought the earthquake was news, and had 
stopped to write a story about it. So, we 
sent a telegram to our consul. 

The American consul nearest was George 
Emerson Haven at Catania, by train three 
hours distant. We told him for twenty- 
four hours we had been prisoners, and that 
unless we were set free he was to declare 
war on Italy. The telegram was written 
not for the consul to read, but for the bene- 
fit of the port authorities. We hoped it might 

94 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

impress them. We certainly never supposed 
they would permit our ultimatum to reach 
Mr. Haven. In any case, the ship was al- 
lowed to depart. But whether the com- 
mandant of the port was alarmed by our 
declaration of war, or the unusual spectacle 
of the British attache, " Tommy' ' Cunning- 
ham, in khaki while three hundred miles 
distant from any firing-line, we will never 
know.* But the rumor man knew, and ex- 
plained. 

"We had been delayed," he said, "because 
Italy had declared war on Greece, and did 
not want the food on board our ship to enter 
that country." 

The cigarette king told him if the food on 
board was the same food we had been eat- 
ing, to bring it into any country was a 
proper cause for war. 

* Later we were sorry we had not been held longer in 
captivity. The telegram reached our consul, and that gentle- 
man at once journeyed to Messina not only to rescue us, but 
to invite us to a Thanksgiving Day dinner. A consul like 
that is wasted on the Island of Sicily. The State Depart- 
ment is respectfully urged to promote him to the mainland. 

95 



FROM PARIS TO THE PIR^US 

At noon we passed safely between Scylla 
and Charybdis, and the following morning 
were in Athens. 



96 



CHAPTER V 

WHY KING CONSTANTINE IS NEUTRAL 

Athens, November, 191 5. 

WE are not allowed to tell what the 
situation is here. But, in spite of the 
censor, I am going to tell what the situation 
is. It is involved. That is not because no 
one will explain it. In Greece at present, ex- 
plaining the situation is the national pastime. 
Since arriving yesterday I have had the sit- 
uation explained to me by members of the 
Cabinet, guides to the Acropolis, generals in 
the army, Teofani, the cigarette king, three 
ministers plenipotentiary, the man from St. 
Louis who is over here to sell aeroplanes, the 
man from Cook's, and "extra people," like 
soldiers in cafes, brigands in petticoats, and 
peasants in peaked shoes with tassels. They 
asked me not to print their names, which 
was just as well, as I cannot spell them. 

97 



WHY KING CONSTANTINE 

They each explained the situation differently, 
but all agree it is involved. 

To understand it, you must go back to 
Helen of Troy, take a running jump from the 
Greek war for independence and Lord Byron 
to Mr. Gladstone and the Bulgarian atroci- 
ties, note the influence of the German Em- 
peror at Corfu, appreciate the intricacies of 
Russian diplomacy in Belgrade, the rise of 
Enver Pasha and the Young Turks, what 
Constantine said to Venizelos about giving 
up Kavalla, and the cablegram Prince Danilo, 
of "Merry Widow' ' fame, sent to his cousin 
of Italy. By following these events, the sit- 
uation is as easy to grasp as an eel that has 
swallowed the hook and cannot digest it. 

For instance, Mr. Poneropolous, the well- 
known contractor who sells shoes to the 
army, informs me the Greeks as one man 
want war. They are even prepared to fight 
for it. On the other hand, Axon Skiadas, 
the popular barber of the Hotel Grande 
Bretagne, who has just been called to the 

98 



IS NEUTRAL 

colors, assures me no patriot would again 
plunge this country into conflict. 

The diplomats also disagree, especially 
as to which of them is responsible for the 
failure of Greece to join the Allies. The 
one who is to blame for that never is the 
one who is talking to you. The one who is 
talking is always the one who, had they 
followed his advice, could have saved the 
"situation." They did not, and now it is 
involved, not to say addled. The military 
attache of Great Britain volunteered to set 
the situation before me in a few words. 
After explaining for two hours, he asked me 
to promise not to repeat what he had said. 
I promised. Another diplomat, who was pro- 
jected into the service by William Jennings 
Bryan, said if he told all he knew about the 
situation "the world would burst." Those 
are his exact words. It would have been 
an event of undoubted news value, and as 
a news-gatherer I should have coaxed his 
secret from him, but it seemed as though 

99 



WHY KING CONSTANTINE 

the world is in trouble enough as it is, and if 
it must burst I want it to burst when I am 
nearer home. So I switched him off to the 
St. Louis convention, where he was prob- 
ably more useful than he will ever be in the 
Balkans. 

While every one is guessing, the writer 
ventures to make a guess. It is that Greece 
will remain neutral, or will join the Allies. 
Without starving to death she cannot join 
the Germans. Greece is non-supporting. 
What she eats comes in the shape of wheat 
from outside her borders, from the grain- 
fields of Russia, Egypt, Bulgaria, France, 
and America. When Denys Cochin, the 
French minister to Athens, had his inter- 
view with the King, the latter became angry 
and said, "We can get along without France's 
money," and Cochin said: "That is true, 
but you cannot get along without France's 
wheat." 

The Allies aire not going to bombard 
Greek ports or shell the Acropolis. They 

ioo 



IS NEUTRAL 

will not even blockade the ports. But their 
fleets — French, Italian, English — will stop 
all ships taking foodstuffs to Greece. They 
have just released seven grain ships from 
America, that were held up at Malta, and 
ships carrying food to Greece have been 
stopped at points as far away as Gibraltar. 
As related in the last chapter, the Greek 
steamer on which we sailed from Naples 
was held up at Messina for twenty-four 
hours until her cargo was overhauled. As 
we had nothing in the hold more health- 
sustaining than hides and barbed wire, we 
were allowed to proceed. 

Whatever course Greece follows, her de- 
pendence upon others for food explains her 
act. To-day (November 29) there is not 
enough wheat in the country to feed the 
people for, some say three — the most op- 
timistic, ten — days. Should she decide to 
join Germany she would starve. It would 
be deliberate suicide. The French and Ital- 
ian fleets are at Malta, less than a day dis- 

IOI 



WHY KING CONSTANTINE 

tant; the English fleet is off the Gallipoli 
peninsula. Fifteen hours' steaming could 
bring it to Salonika. Greece is especially 
vulnerable from the sea. She is all islands, 
coast towns, and seaports. The German 
navy could not help her. It will not leave 
the Kiel Canal. The Austrian navy cannot 
leave the Adriatic. Should Greece decide 
against the Allies, their combined war-ships 
would pick up her islands and blockade her 
ports. In a week she would be starving. 
The railroad from Bulgaria to Salonika, over 
which in peace times comes much wheat 
from Roumania, would be closed to her. 
Even if the Germans and Bulgarians suc- 
ceeded in winning it to the coast, they could 
get no food for Greece farther than that. 
They have no war-ships, and the Gulf of 
Salonika is full of those of the Allies. 

The position of King Constantine is very 
difficult. He is supposed to be strongly pro- 
German, and the reason for his sympathy 
that is given here is the same as is accepted 

I02 




From a photograph by Underwood and Und 



King Constantine of Greece and commander-in-chief of her 
armies. 

In two years he led his people to victory in two wars. If now they desire 
peace and in this big war the right to remain neutral, he thinks they have 
earned that right. 



IS NEUTRAL 

in America. Every act of his is supposed 
to be inspired by family influences, when, 
as he has stated publicly through his friend 
Walter Harris of the London Times, he is 
pro-English, and has been actuated solely 
by what he thought was best for his own 
people. Indeed, there are many who believe 
if the terms upon which Greece might join 
the Allies had been left to the King instead 
of to Venizelos, Greece now would be with 
the Entente. 

Or, if Greece remained neutral, no one 
could better judge whether neutrality was 
or was not best for her than Constantine. 
In the three years before the World War, 
he had led his countrymen through two 
wars, and if both, as King and commander 
of her armies, he thought they needed rest 
and peace, he was entitled to that opinion. 
Instead, he was misrepresented and abused. 
His motives were assailed; he was accused 
of being dominated by his Imperial brother- 
in-law. At no time since the present war 

103 



WHY KING CONSTANTINE 

began has he been given what we would 
call a "square deal." The writer has followed 
the career of Constantine since the Greek- 
Turkish war of 1897, when they "drank 
from the same canteen," and as Kings go, or 
until they all do go, respects him as a good 
King. To his people he is generous, kind, 
and considerate; as a general he has added 
to the territory of Greece many miles and 
seaports; he is fond of his home and family, 
and in his reign there has been no scandal, 
no Knights of the Round Table, such as 
disgraced the German court, no Tripoli mas- 
sacre, no Congo atrocities, no Winter Garden 
or La Scala favorites. Venizelos may or 
may not be as unselfish a patriot. But 
justly or not, it is difficult to disassociate 
what Venizelos wants for Greece with what 
he wants for Venizelos. The King is re- 
moved from any such suspicion. He is 
already a King, and except in continuing 
to be a good King, he can go no higher. 
How Venizelos came so prominently into 
104 



IS NEUTRAL 

the game is not without interest. As long 
ago as when the two German cruisers escaped 
from Messina and were sold to Turkey, the 
diplomatic representatives of the Allies in the 
Balkans were instructed to see that Turkey 
and Germany did not get together, and that, 
as a balance of power in case of such a 
union, the Balkan States were kept in line. 
Instead of themselves attending to this, the 
diplomats placed the delicate job in the hands 
of one man. At the framing of the Treaty 
of London, of all the representatives from the 
Balkans, the one who most deeply impressed 
the other powers was M. Venizelos. And the 
task of keeping the Balkans neutral or with 
the Allies was left to him. 

He has a dream of a Balkan "band," a 
union of all the Balkan principalities. It 
obsesses him. And to bring that dream true 
he was willing to make concessions which 
King Constantine, who considered only what 
was good for Greece, and was not concerned 
with a Balkan alliance, thought most un- 

105 



WHY KING CONSTANTINE 

wise. Venizelos also was working for the 
good of Greece, but he was convinced it 
could come to her only through the union. 
He was willing to give Kavalla to Bulgaria 
in exchange for Asia Minor, from the Dar- 
danelles to Smyrna. But the King would 
not consent. As a buffer against Turkey, 
he considered Kavalla of the greatest stra- 
tegic value, and he had the natural pride of 
a soldier in holding on to land he himself 
had added to his country. But in his op- 
position to Venizelos in this particular, credit 
was not given him for acting in the interests 
of Greece, but of playing into the hands of 
Germany. 

Another step he refused to take, which 
refusal the Allies attributed to his pro- 
German leanings, was to attack the Dar- 
danelles. In the wars of 1912-13 the King 
showed he was an able general. With his 
staff he had carefully considered an at- 
tack upon the Dardanelles. He submitted 
this plan to the Allies, and was willing to 

1 06 



IS NEUTRAL 

aid them if they brought to the assault 
400,000 men. They claim he failed them. 
He did fail them, but not until after they 
had failed him by bringing thousands of 
men instead of the tens of thousands he 
knew were needed. 

The Dardanelles expedition was not re- 
quired to prove the courage of the French 
and British. Beyond furnishing fresh evi- 
dence of that, it has been a failure. And in 
refusing to sacrifice the lives of his subjects 
the military judgment of Constantine has 
been vindicated. He was willing to attack 
Turkey through Kavalla and Thrace, be- 
cause by that route he presented an armed 
front to Bulgaria. But, as he pointed out, 
if he sent his army to the Dardanelles, he 
left Kavalla at the mercy of his enemy. 
In his mistrust of Bulgaria he has certainly 
been justified. 

Greece is not at war, but in outward ap- 
pearance she is as firmly on a war footing 
as is France or Italy. A man out of uniform 

107 



WHY KING CONSTANTINE 

is conspicuous, and all day regiments pass 
through the streets carrying the campaign kit 
and followed by the medical corps, the moun- 
tain batteries, and the transport wagons. 
In the streets the crowds are cheering Denys 
Cochin, the special ambassador from France. 
He makes speeches to them from the bal- 
cony of our hotel, and the mob wave flags 
and shout "Zito! Zito!" 

In a play Colonel Savage produced, I 
once wrote the same scene and placed it in 
the same hotel in Athens. In Athens the 
local color was superior to ours, but George 
Marion stage-managed the mob better than 
did the Athens police. 

Athens is in a perplexed state of mind. 
She does not know if she wants to go to war 
or wants peace. She does not know if she 
should go to war, on which side she wants 
to fight. People tell you frankly that their 
heart-beats are with France, but that they 
are afraid of Germany. 

"If Germany wins," they asked, "what 
108 



IS NEUTRAL 

will become of us? The Germans already 
are in Monastir, twenty miles from our 
border. They have driven the Serbians, the 
French, and the British out of Serbia, and 
they will make our King a German vassal." 

"Then, why don't you go out and fight for 
your King?" I asked. 

"He won't let us," they said. 

When the army of a country is mobilized, 
it is hard to understand that that country 
is neutral. You expect to see evidences of 
her partisanship for one cause or the other. 
But in Athens, from a shop-window point 
of view, both the Allies and the Germans are 
equally supported. There are just as many 
pictures of the German generals as of Joffre, 
as many post-cards of the German Emperor 
as of King George and King Albert. After 
Paris, it is a shock to see German books, 
portraits of German statesmen, composers, 
and musicians. In one shop-window con- 
spicuously featured, evidently with intent, 
is an engraving showing Napoleon III sur- 

109 



WHY KING CONSTANTINE IS NEUTRAL 

rendering to Bismarck. In the principal 
bookstore, books in German on German vic- 
tories, and English and French pamphlets on 
German atrocities stand shoulder to shoul- 
der. The choice is with you. 

Meanwhile, on every hand are the signs 
of a nation on the brink of war; of armies 
of men withdrawn from trades, professions, 
homes; of men marching and drilling in 
squads, companies, brigades. At times the 
columns are so long that in passing the win- 
dows of the hotel they take an hour. All 
these fighting men must be fed, clothed, 
paid, and while they are waiting to fight, 
whether they are goatherds or piano-tuners 
or shopkeepers, their business is going to 
the devil. 



no 



CHAPTER VI 
WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

Salonika, December, 1915. 

WE left Athens on the first ship that was 
listed for Salonika. She was a strange 
ship. During many years on various vessels 
in various seas, she was the most remarkable. 
Every Greek loves to gamble; but for 'some 
reason, or for that very reason, for him to 
gamble on shore is by law made difficult. 
In consequence, as soon as the Hermoupolis 
raised anchor she became a floating, gambling- 
hell. There were twenty-four first-class pas- 
sengers who were in every way first class; 
Greek officers, bankers, merchants, and dep- 
uties, and their time on the steamer from 
eleven each morning until four the next 
morning was spent in dealing baccarat. 

When the stewards, who were among the 
few persons on board who did not play, 

in 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

tried to spread a table-cloth and serve food, 
they were indignantly rebuked. The most 
untiring players were the captain and the 
ship's officers. Whenever they found that 
navigating their ship interfered with their 
baccarat we came to anchor. We should 
have reached Salonika in a day and a half. 
We arrived after four days. And all of each 
day and half of each night we were anchored 
in midstream while the captain took the 
bank. The hills of Eubcea and the main- 
land formed a giant funnel of snow, through 
which the wind roared. It swept the ship 
from bow to stern, turning to ice the wood- 
work, the velvet cushions, even the blankets. 
Fortunately, it was not the kind of a ship 
that supplied sheets, or we would have frozen 
in our berths. Outside of the engine-room, 
which was aft, there was no heat of any 
sort, but undaunted, the gamblers, in caps 
and fur coats, their breath rising in icy clouds, 
crouched around the table, their frozen fin- 
gers fumbling with the cards. 

112 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

There were two charming Italians on board, 
a father and son — the father absurdly youth- 
ful, the boy incredibly wise. They operate a 
chain of banks through the Levant. They 
watched the game but did not play. The 
father explained this to me. "My dear son 
is a born gambler," he said. "So, in order 
that I may set him an example, I will not 
play until after he has gone to sleep.' ' 

Later, the son also explained. "My dear 
father," he whispered, "is an inveterate 
gambler. So, in order that I may reprove 
him, I do not gamble. At least not until he 
has gone to bed." At midnight I left them 
still watching each other. The next day the 
son said: "I got no sleep last night. For 
some reason, my dear father was wakeful, 
and it was four o'clock before he went to his 
cabin." 

When we reached Volo the sun was shin- 
ing, and as the day was so beautiful, the 
gamblers remained on board and played bac- 
carat. The rest of us explored Volo. On 

113 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

the mountains above it the Twenty-Four 
Villages were in sight, nestling on the knees 
of the hills. Their red-tiled houses rose one 
above the other, the roof of one on a line 
with the door-step of the neighbor just over- 
head. Their white walls, for Volo is a sum- 
mer resort, were merged in the masses of 
snow, but in Volo itself roses were still bloom- 
ing, and in every garden the trees were heavy 
with oranges. They were so many that they 
hid the green leaves, and against the walls of 
purple, blue, and Pompeian red, made won- 
derful splashes of a gorgeous gold. 

Apparently the captain was winning, for he 
sent word he would not sail until midnight, 
and nine of his passengers dined ashore. 
We were so long at table, not because the 
dinner was good, but because there was a 
charcoal brazier in the room, that we missed 
the moving-pictures. So the young Italian 
banker was sent to bargain for a second and 
special performance. In the Levant there 
always is one man who works, and one man 

114 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

who manages him. A sort of impresario. 
Even the boatmen and bootblacks have a 
manager who arranges the financial details. 
It is difficult to buy a newspaper without 
dealing through a third party. The moving- 
picture show, being of importance, had seven 
managers. The young Italian, undismayed, 
faced all of them. He wrangled in Greek, 
Turkish, French, and Italian, and they all 
talked to him at the same time. Finally 
the negotiations came to an end, but our 
ambassador was not satisfied. 

"They got the best of me," he reported 
to us. "They are going to give the show over 
again, and we are to have the services of the 
pianist, the orchestra of five, and the lady 
vocalist. But I had to agree to pay for the 
combined entertainment entirely too much." 

"How much?" I asked. 

"Eight drachmas," he said apologetically, 
"or, in your money, one dollar and fifty- 
two cents." 

"Each?" I said. 

us 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

He exclaimed in horror: "No, divided 
among the nine of us !" 

No wonder Volo is a popular summer re- 
sort, even in December. 

The next day, after sunset, we saw the 
snow-capped peak of Mount Olympus and 
the lamps of a curving water-front, the long 
rows of green air ports that mark the French 
hospital ships, the cargo lights turned on the 
red crosses painted on their sides, the gray, 
grim battleships of England, France, Italy, 
and Greece, and a bustling torpedo-boat 
took us in tow, and guided us through the 
floating mines and into the harbor of Sa- 
lonika. 

If it is true that happy are the people 
without a history, then Salonika should be 
thoroughly miserable. Some people make 
history; others have history thrust upon 
them. Ever since the world began Salonika 
has had history thrust upon her. She aspired 
only to be a great trading seaport. She was 
content to be the place where the caravans 

116 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

from the Balkans met the ships from the 
shores of the Mediterranean, Egypt, and 
Asia Minor. Her wharfs were counters across 
which they could swap merchandise. All 
she asked was to be allowed to change their 
money. Instead of which, when any two 
nations of the Near East went to the mat to 
settle their troubles, Salonika was the mat. 
If any country within a thousand-mile ra- 
dius declared war on any other country in 
any direction whatsoever, the armies of both 
belligerents clashed at Salonika. They not 
only used her as a door-mat, but they used 
her hills to the north of the city for their 
battle-field. In the fighting, Salonika took 
no part. She merely loaned the hills. But 
she knew, whichever side won, two things 
would happen to her: She would pay a 
forced loan and subscribe to an entirely 
new religion. Three hundred years before 
Christ, the people of Salonika worshipped 
the mysterious gods who had their earthly 
habitation on the island of Thasos. The 

117 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

Greeks ejected them, and erected altars to 
Apollo and Aphrodite, the Egyptians fol- 
lowed and taught Salonika to fear Serapis; 
then came Roman gods and Roman gen- 
erals; and then St. Paul. The Jews set up 
synagogues, the Mohammedans reared min- 
arets, the Crusaders restored the cross, the 
Tripolitans restored the crescent, the Vene- 
tians re-restored Christianity. Romans, 
Greeks, Byzantines, Persians, Franks, Egyp- 
tians, and Barbary pirates, all, at one time 
or another, invaded Salonika. She was the 
butcher's block upon which they carved 
history. Some ruled her only for months, 
others for years. Of the monuments to the 
religions forced upon her, the most numerous 
to-day are the synagogues of the Jews and 
the mosques of the Mohammedans. It was 
not only fighting men who invaded Salonika. 
Italy can count her great earthquakes on 
one hand; the United States on one finger. 
But a resident of Salonika does not speak 
of the "year of the earthquake." For him, 

118 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

it saves time to name the years when there 
was no earthquake. Each of those years 
was generally "the year of the great fire." 
If it wasn't one thing, it was another. If 
it was not a tidal wave, it was an epidemic; 
if it was not a war, it was a blizzard. The 
trade of Asia Minor flows into Salonika and 
with it carries all the plagues of Egypt. 
Epidemics of cholera in Salonika used to 
be as common as yellow fever in Guayaquil. 
Those years the cholera came the people 
abandoned the seaport and lived on the 
plains north of Salonika, in tents. If the 
cholera spared them, the city was swept by 
fire; if there was no fire, there came a great 
frost. Salonika is on the same latitude as 
Naples, Madrid, and New York; and New 
York is not unacquainted with blizzards. 
Since the seventeenth century, last winter 
was said to be the coldest Salonika has ever 
known. I was not there in the seventeenth 
century, but am willing to believe that last 
winter was the coldest since then; not 

119 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

only to believe it, but to swear to it. Of 
the frost in 1657 the Salonikans boast the 
cold was so severe that to get wood the 
people destroyed their houses. This Decem- 
ber, when on the English and French front 
in Serbia, I saw soldiers using the same kind 
of fire-wood. They knew a mud house that 
is held together with beams and rafters can 
be rebuilt, but that you cannot rebuild fro- 
zen toes and fingers. 

In thrusting history upon Salonika, the 
last few years have been especially busy. 
They gave her a fire that destroyed a great 
part of the city, and between 1911 and 1914 
two cholera epidemics, the Italian-Turkish 
War, which, as Salonika was then Turkish, 
robbed her of hundreds of her best men, the 
Balkan-Turkish War, and the Second Bal- 
kan War. In this Salonika was part of the 
spoils, and Greece and Bulgaria fought to 
possess her. The Greeks won, and during 
one year she was at peace. Then, in 1914, 
the Great War came, and Serbia sent out an. 

120 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

S. O. S. call to her Allies. At the Darda- 
nelles, not eighteen hours away, the French 
and English heard the call. But to reach 
Serbia by the shortest route they must dis- 
embark at Salonika, a port belonging to 
Greece, a neutral power; and in moving north 
from Salonika into Serbia they must pass 
over fifty miles of neutral Greek territory. 
Venizelos, prime minister of Greece, gave 
them permission. King Constantine, to pre- 
serve his neutrality, disavowed the act of 
his representative, and Venizelos resigned. 
From the point of view of the Allies, the 
disavowal came too late. As soon as they 
had received permission from the recognized 
Greek Government, they started, and, leav- 
ing the King and Venizelos to fight it out 
between them, landed at Salonika. The in- 
habitants received them calmly. The Greek 
officials, the colonel commanding the Greek 
troops, the Greek captain of the port, and 
the Greek collector of customs may have 
been upset; but the people of Salonika re- 

121 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

mained calm. They were used to it. For- 
eign troops were always landing at Salonika. 
The oldest inhabitant could remember, among 
others, those of Alexander the Great, Mark 
Antony, Constantine, the Sultan Murad, 
and several hundred thousand French and 
English who over their armor wore a red 
cross. So he was not surprised when, after 
seven hundred years, the French and Eng- 
lish returned, still wearing the red cross. 

One of the greatest assets of those who 
live in a seaport city is a view of their har- 
bor. As a rule, that view is hidden from 
them by zinc sheds on the wharfs and ware- 
houses. But in Salonika the water-front 
belongs to everybody. To the north it en- 
closes the harbor in a great half-moon that 
from tip to tip measures three miles. At 
the western tip of this crescent are tucked 
away the wharfs for the big steamers, the 
bonded warehouses, the customs, the goods- 
sheds. The rest of the water-front is open 
to the people and to the small sailing vessels. 

122 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

For over a mile it is bordered by a stone 
quay, with stone steps leading down to the 
rowboats. Along this quay runs the principal 
street, and on the side of it that faces the 
harbor, in an unbroken row, are the hotels, 
the houses of the rich Turks and Jews, clubs, 
restaurants, cafes, and moving-picture thea- 
tres. At night, when these places are blazing 
with electric lights, the curving water-front 
is as bright as Broadway — but Broadway 
with one-half of the street in darkness. On 
the dark side of the street, to the quay, are 
moored hundreds of sailing vessels. Except 
that they are painted and gilded differently, 
they look like sisters. They are fat, squat 
sisters with the lines of half a cantaloupe. 
Each has a single mast and a lateen-sail, 
like the Italian felucca and the sailing boats 
of the Nile. When they are moored to the 
quay and the sail is furled, each yard-arm, 
in a graceful, sweeping curve, slants down- 
ward. Against the sky, in wonderful con- 
fusion, they follow the edge of the half -moon; 

123 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

the masts a forest of dead tree trunks, the 
slanting yards giant quill pens dipping into 
an ink-well. Their hulls are rich in gilding 
and in colors — green, red, pink, and blue. 
At night the electric signs of a moving-pic- 
ture palace on the opposite side of the street 
illuminate them from bow to stern. It is 
one of those bizarre contrasts you find in 
the Near East. On one side of the quay a 
perfectly modern hotel, on the other a boat 
unloading fish, and in the street itself, with 
French automobiles and trolley-cars, men 
who still are beasts of burden, who know no 
other way of carrying a bale or a box than 
upon their shoulders. In Salonika even the 
trolley-car is not without its contrast. One 
of our "Jim Crow" street-cars would puzzle 
a Turk. He would not understand why we 
separate the white and the black man. But 
his own street-car is also subdivided. In 
each there are four seats that can be hidden 
by a curtain. They are for the women of 

his harem. 

124 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

From the water-front Salonika climbs 
steadily up-hill to the row of hills that form 
her third and last line of defense. On the 
hill upon which the city stands are the walls 
and citadel built in the fifteenth century by 
the Turks, and in which, when the city was 
invaded, the inhabitants sought refuge. In 
aspect it is mediaeval; the rest of the city is 
modern and Turkish. The streets are very 
narrow; in many the second stories overhang 
them and almost touch, and against the sky- 
line rise many minarets. But the Turks do 
not predominate. They have their quarter, 
and so, too, have the French and the Jews. 
In numbers the Jews exceed all the others. 
They form fifty-six per cent of a population 
composed of Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Bul- 
garians, Egyptians, French, and Italians. 
The Jews came to Salonika the year America 
was discovered. To avoid the Inquisition 
they fled from Spain and Portugal and brought 
their language with them; and after five hun- 
dred years it still obtains. It has been called 

125 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

the Esperanto of the Salonikans. For the 
small shopkeeper, the cabman, the waiter, it 
is the common tongue. In such an environ- 
ment it sounds most curious. When, in a 
Turkish restaurant, you order a dinner in 
the same words you last used in Vera Cruz, 
and the dinner arrives, it seems uncanny. 
But, in Salonika, the language most gen- 
erally spoken is French. Among so many 
different races they found, if they hoped to 
talk business — and a Greek, an Armenian, 
and a Jew are not averse to talking busi- 
ness — a common tongue was necessary. So, 
all those who are educated, even most sketch- 
ily, speak French. The greater number of 
newspapers are in French; and notices, ad- 
vertisements, and official announcements are 
printed in that language. It makes life in 
Salonika difficult. When a man attacks you 
in Turkish, Yiddish, or Greek, and you can- 
not understand him, there is some excuse, 
but when he instantly renews the attack in 
both French and Spanish, it is disheartening. 

126 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

It makes you regret that when you were in 
college the only foreign language you studied 
was football signals. 

At any time, without the added presence of 
100,000 Greeks and 170,000 French and Eng- 
lish, Salonika appears overpopulated. This 
is partly because the streets are narrow and 
because in the streets everybody gathers 
to talk, eat, and trade. As in all Turkish 
cities, nearly every shop is an "open shop." 
The counter is where the window ought to 
be, and opens directly upon the sidewalk. 
A man does not enter the door of a shop, he 
stands on the sidewalk, which is only thirty- 
six inches wide, and makes his purchase 
through the window. This causes a crowd to 
collect. Partly because the man is blocking 
the sidewalk, but chiefly because there is a 
chance that something may be bought and 
paid for. In normal times, if Salonika is 
ever normal, she has a population of 120,000, 
and every one of those 120,000 is personally 
interested in any one else who engages, or 

127 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

may be about to engage, in a money trans- 
action. In New York, if a horse falls down 
there is at once an audience of a dozen per- 
sons; in Salonika the downfall of a horse is 
nobody's business, but a copper coin chang- 
ing hands is everybody's. Of this local 
characteristic, John T. McCutcheon and I 
made a careful study; and the result of our 
investigations produced certain statistics. If 
in Salonika you buy a newspaper from a news- 
boy, of the persons passing, two will stop; if 
at an open shop you buy a package of ciga- 
rettes, five people will look over your shoul- 
der; if you pay your cab-driver his fare, you 
block the sidewalk; and if you try to change 
a hundred-franc note, you cause a riot. In 
each block there are nearly a half dozen 
money-changers; they sit in little shops as 
narrow as a doorway, and in front of them is 
a show-case filled with all the moneys of the 
world. It is not alone the sight of your hun- 
dred-franc note that enchants the crowd. 
That collects the crowd; but what holds the 

128 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

crowd is that it knows there are twenty dif- 
ferent kinds of money, all current in Sa- 
lonika, into which your note can be changed. 
And they know the money-changer knows 
that and that you do not. So each man ad- 
vises you. Not because he does not want to 
see you cheated — between you and the 
money-changer he is neutral — but because 
he can no more keep out of a money deal 
than can a fly pass a sugar-bowl. 

The men on the outskirts of the crowd 
ask: "What does he offer?" 

The lucky ones in the front-row seats 
call back: "A hundred and eighteen drach- 
mas." The rear ranks shout with indigna- 
tion. "It is robbery!" "It is because he 
changes his money in Venizelos Street." 
"He is paying the money-changer's rent." 
"In the Jewish quarter they are giving 
nineteen." "He is too lazy to walk two 
miles for a drachma." "Then let him go 
to the Greek, Papanastassion." 

A man in a fez whispers to you impres- 
129 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

sively: "La livre turque est encore d'un 
usage fort courant. La valeur au pair est 
de francs vingt-deux." But at this the 
Armenian shrieks violently. He scorns Turk- 
ish money and advises Italian lire. At the 
idea of lire the crowd howl. They hurl at 
you instead francs, piastres, paras, drachmas, 
lepta, metalliks, mejidis, centimes, and Eng- 
lish shillings. The money-changer argues 
with them gravely. He does not send for 
the police to drive them away. He does not 
tell them: "This is none of your business.' ' 
He knows better. In Salonika, it lis their 
business. 

In Salonika, after money, the thing of 
most consequence is conversation. Men who 
are talking always have the right of way. 
When two men of Salonika are seized with a 
craving for conversation, they feel, until 
that craving is satisfied, that nothing else is 
important. So, when the ruling passion grips 
them, no matter where they may meet, they 
stop dead in their tracks and talk. If possible 

130 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

they select the spot, where by standing still 
they can cause the greatest amount of in- 
convenience to the largest number of people. 
They do not withdraw from the sidewalk. 
On the contrary, as best suited for conversa- 
tion, they prefer the middle of it, the door- 
way of a cafe, or the centre aisle of a res- 
taurant. Of the people who wish to pass they 
are as unconscious as a Chinaman smoking 
opium is unconscious of the sightseers from 
up-town. That they are talking is all that 
counts. They feel every one else should ap- 
preciate that. Because the Allies failed to 
appreciate it, they gained a reputation for 
rudeness. A French car, flying the flag of 
the general, a squad of Tommies under arms, 
a motor-cyclist carrying despatches could 
not understand that a conversation on a 
street crossing was a sacred ceremony. So 
they shouldered the conversationalists aside 
or splashed them with mud. It was in- 
tolerable. Had they stamped into a mosque 
in their hobnailed boots, on account of their 

131 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

faulty religious training, the Salonikans might 
have excused them. But that a man driving 
an ambulance full of wounded should think 
he had the right to disturb a conversation 
that was blocking the traffic of only the 
entire water-front was a discourtesy no Sa- 
lonikan could comprehend. 

The wonder was that among so many 
mixed races the clashes were so few. In 
one place seldom have people of so many 
different nationalities met, and with in- 
terests so absolutely opposed. It was a 
situation that would have been serious had 
it not been comic. For causing it, for per- 
mitting it to continue, Greece was respon- 
sible. Her position was not happy. She was 
between the Allies and the Kaiser. Than 
Greece, no country is more vulnerable from 
an attack by sea; and if she offended the 
Allies, their combined fleets at Malta and 
Lemnos could seize all her little islands and 
seaports. If she offended the Kaiser, he 
would send the Bulgarians into eastern 

132 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

Thrace and take Salonika, from which only 
two years before Greece had dispossessed 
them. Her position was indeed most difficult. 
As the barber at the Grande Bretange in 
Athens told me: "It makes me a head- 
ache." 

On many a better head than his it had 
the same effect. King Constantine, be- 
cause he believed it was best for Greece, 
wanted to keep his country neutral. But 
after Venizelos had invited the Allies to 
make a landing-place and a base for their 
armies at Salonika, Greece was no longer 
neutral. If our government invited 170,- 
000 German troops to land at Portland, 
and through Maine invade Canada, our 
neutrality would be lost. The neutrality 
of Greece was lost, but Constantine would 
not see that. He hoped, although 170,000 
fighting men are not easy to hide, that the 
Kaiser also would not see it. It was a very 
forlorn hope. The Allies also cherished a 
hope. It was that Constantine not only 

i33 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

would look the other way while they slipped 
across his country, but would cast off all 
pretense of neutrality and join them. So, 
as far as was possible, they avoided giving 
offense. They assisted him in his pretense 
of neutrality. And that was what caused 
the situation. It was worthy of a comic 
opera. Before the return of the allied troops 
to Salonika, there were on the neutral soil 
of Greece, divided between Salonika and the 
front in Serbia, 110,000 French soldiers and 
60,000 British. Of these, 100,000 were in 
Salonika. The advanced British base was 
at Doiran and the French advanced base at 
Strumnitza railroad-station. In both places 
martial law existed. But at the main base, 
at Salonika, both armies were under the local 
authority of the Greeks. They submitted to 
the authority of the Greeks because they 
wanted to keep up the superstition that Sa- 
lonika was a neutral port, when the mere 
fact that they were there proved she was 
not. It was a situation almost unparalleled 

i34 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

in military history. At the base of a French 
and of a British army, numbering together 
170,000 men, the generals who commanded 
them possessed less local authority than one 
Greek policeman. They were guests. They 
were invited guests of the Greek, and they 
had no more right to object to his other guests 
or to rearrange his house rules than would 
you have the right, when a guest in a strange 
club, to reprimand the servants. The Allies 
had in the streets military police; but they 
held authority over only soldiers of their 
own country; they could not interfere with 
a Greek soldier, or with a civilian of any 
nation, and even the provost guard sent out 
at night was composed not alone of French 
and English but of an equal number of Greeks. 
I often wondered in what language they is- 
sued commands. As an instance of how 
strictly the Allies recognized the authority 
of the neutral Greek, and how jealously he 
guarded it, there was the case of the Entente 
Cafe. The proprietor of the Entente Cafe 

i35 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

was a Greek. A British soldier was ill- 
treated in his cafe, and by the British com- 
manding officer the place, so far as British 
soldiers and sailors were concerned, was 
declared "out of bounds." A notice to that 
effect was hung in the window. But it was 
a Greek policeman who placed it there. 

In matters much more important, the 
fact that the Allies were in a neutral seaport 
greatly embarrassed them. They were not 
allowed to censor news despatches nor to 
examine the passports of those who arrived 
and departed. The question of the censor- 
ship was not so serious as it might appear. 
General Sarrail explained to the correspon- 
dents what might and what might not be 
sent, and though what we wrote was not 
read in Salonika by a French or British cen- 
sor, General Sarrail knew it would be read 
by censors of the Allies at Malta, Rome, 
Paris, and London. Any news despatch 
that, unscathed, ran that gantlet, while it 

might not help the Allies certainly would 

136 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

not harm them. One cablegram of three 
hundred words, sent by an American corre- 
spondent, after it had been blue-pencilled 
by the Greek censors in Salonika and Athens, 
and by the four allied censors, arrived at 
his London office consisting entirely of 
"ands" and "thes." So, if not from their 
censors, at least from the correspondents, 
the Allies were protected. But against the 
really serious danger of spies they were help- 
less. In New York the water-fronts are 
guarded. Unless he is known, no one can 
set foot upon a wharf. Night and day, 
against spies and German military attaches 
bearing explosive bombs, steamers loading 
munitions are surrounded by police, watch- 
men, and detectives. But in Salonika the 
wharfs were as free to any one as a park 
bench, and the quay supplied every spy, Ger- 
man, Bulgarian, Turk or Austrian, with an 
uninterrupted view. To suppose spies did 
not avail themselves of this opportunity is to 
insult their intelligence. They swarmed. In 

i37 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

solid formation spies lined the quay. For 
every landing-party of bluejackets they formed 
a committee of welcome. Of every man, gun, 
horse, and box of ammunition that came 
ashore they kept tally. On one side of the 
wharf stood "P. N. T. O.," principal naval 
transport officer, in gold braid, ribbons, 
and armlet, keeping an eye on every box of 
shell, gun-carriage, and caisson that was 
swung from a transport, and twenty feet 
from him, and keeping count with him, 
would be two dozen spies. And, to make it 
worse, the P. N. T. 0. knew they were s'pies. 
The cold was intense and wood so scarce 
that to obtain it men used to row out two 
miles and collect the boxes thrown over- 
board from the transports and battleships. 
Half of these men had but the slightest in- 
terest in kindling-wood; they were learning 
the position of each battleship, counting her 
guns, noting their caliber, counting the men 
crowding the rails of the transports, reading 
the insignia on their shoulder-straps, and, 

138 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

as commands and orders were wigwagged 
from ship to ship, writing them down. Other 
spies took the trouble to disguise themselves 
in rags and turbans, and, mixing with the 
Tommies, sold them sweetmeats, fruit, and 
cigarettes. The spy told the Tommy he was 
his ally, a Serbian refugee; and Tommy, or 
the poilu, to whom Bulgarians, Turks, and 
Serbians all look alike, received him as a 
comrade. 

"You had a rough passage from Mar- 
seilles," ventures the spy. "We come from 
the peninsula," says Tommy. "Three thou- 
sand of you on such a little ship!" exclaims 
the sympathetic Serbian. "You must have 
been crowded!" "Crowded as hell," cor- 
rects Tommy, "because there are five thou- 
sand of us." Over these common spies were 
master spies, Turkish and German officers 
from Berlin and Constantinople. They sat 
in the same restaurants with the French and 
English officers. They were in mufti, but 
had they appeared in uniform, while it might 

i39 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

have led to a riot, in this neutral port they 
would have been entirely within their rights. 
The clearing-houses for the spies were the 
consulates of Austria, Turkey, and Ger- 
many. From there what information the 
spies turned in was forwarded to the front. 
The Allies were helpless to prevent. How 
helpless may be judged from these quota- 
tions that are translated from Phos, a Greek 
newspaper published daily in Salonika, and 
which any one could buy in the streets. 
"The English and French forces mean to 
retreat. Yesterday six trains of two hun- 
dred and forty wagons came from the front 
with munitions." "The Allies' first line of 
defense will be at Soulowo, Doiran, Goume- 
nitz. At Topsin and Zachouna intrenchments 
have not yet been started, but strong posi- 
tions have been taken up at Chortiatis and 
Nihor." "Yesterday the landing of British 
reinforcements continued, amounting to 15,- 
000. The guns and munitions were out of 
date. The position of the Allies' battleships 

140 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

has been changed. They are now inside the 
harbor." The most exacting German Gen- 
eral Staff could not ask for better service 
than that! When the Allies retreated from 
Serbia into Salonika every one expected the 
enemy would pursue; and thousands fled 
from the city. But the Germans did not 
pursue, and the reason may have been be- 
cause their spies kept them so well informed. 
If you hold four knaves and, by stealing a 
look at your opponent's hand, see he has 
four kings, to attempt to fight him would 
be suicide. So, in the end, the very freedom 
with which the spies moved about Salonika 
may have been for good. They may have 
prevented the loss of many lives. 

During these strenuous days the position 
of the Greek army in Salonika was most 
difficult. There were of their soldiers nearly 
as many as there were French and British 
combined, and they resented the presence 
of the foreigners in their new city and they 
showed it. But they could not show it in 

141 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

such a way as to give offense, because they 
did not know but that on the morrow with 
the Allies they would be fighting shoulder 
to shoulder. And then, again, they did not 
know but that on the morrow they might be 
with the Germans and fighting against the 
Allies, gun to gun. 

Not knowing just how they stood with 
anybody, and to show they resented the 
invasion of their newly won country by the 
Allies, the Greeks tried to keep proudly 
aloof. In this they failed. For any one to 
flock by himself in Salonika was impossible. 
In a long experience of cities swamped by 
conventions, inaugurations, and coronations, 
of all I ever saw, Salonika was the most deeply 
submerged. During the Japanese-Russian 
War the Japanese told the correspondents 
there were no horses in Corea, and that be- 
fore leaving Japan each should supply him- 
self with one. Dinwiddie refused to obey. 
The Japanese warned him if he did not take 
a pony with him he would be forced to ac- 
company the army on foot. 

142 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

"There will always," replied Dinwiddie, 
"be a pony in Corea for Dinwiddie." It 
became a famous saying. When the alarmist 
tells you all the rooms in all the hotels are 
engaged; that people are sleeping on cots 
and billiard-tables; that there are no front- 
row seats for the Follies, no berths in any 
cabin of any steamer, remind yourself that 
there is always a pony in Corea for Dinwid- 
die. The rule is that the hotel clerk discovers 
a vacant room, a ticket speculator disgorges 
a front-row seat, and the ship's doctor sells 
you a berth in the sick bay. But in Salonika 
the rule failed. As already explained, Sa- 
lonika always is overcrowded. Suddenly, 
added to her 120,000 peoples, came 110,000 
Greek soldiers, their officers, and with many 
of them their families, 60,000 British soldiers 
and sailors, 110,000 French soldiers and 
sailors, and no one knows how many thou- 
sand Serbian soldiers and refugees, both the 
rich and the destitute. The population was 
quadrupled; and four into one you can't. 
Four men cannot with comfort occupy a 

143 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

cot built for one, four men at the same time 
cannot sit on the same chair in a restaurant, 
four men cannot stand on that spot in the 
street where previously there was not room 
enough for one. Still less possible is it for 
three military motor-trucks to occupy the 
space in the street originally intended for 
one small donkey. Of Salonika, a local 
French author has written: "When one en- 
ters the city he is conscious of a cry, con- 
tinuous and piercing. A cry unique and 
monotonous, always resembling itself. It is 
the clamor of Salonika." 

Every one who has visited the East, where 
every one lives in the streets, knows the 
sound. It is like the murmur of a stage mob. 
Imagine, then, that "clamor of Salonika" 
increased by the rumble and roar over the 
huge paving-stones of thousands of giant 
motor-trucks; by the beat of the iron-shod 
hoofs of cavalry, the iron-shod boots of 
men marching in squads, companies, regi- 
ments, the shrieks of peasants herding flocks 

144 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

of sheep, goats, turkeys, cattle; the shouts 
of bootblacks, boatmen, sweetmeat venders; 
newsboys crying the names of Greek papers 
that sound like "Hi hippi hippi hi," "Teyang 
Teyang Teyah"; by the tin horns of the 
trolley-cars, the sirens of automobiles, the 
warning whistles of steamers, of steam- 
launches, of donkey-engines; the creaking 
of cordage and chains on cargo-hoists, and 
by the voices of 300,000 men speaking dif- 
ferent languages, and each, that he may be 
heard above it, adding to the tumult. For 
once the alarmist was right. There were 
no rooms in any hotel. Early in the rush 
John McCutcheon, William G. Shepherd, 
John Bass, and James Hare had taken the 
quarters left vacant by the Austrian Club in 
the Hotel Olympus. The room was vast 
and overlooked the principal square of the 
city, where every Salonikan met to talk, and 
the only landing-place on the quay. From 
the balcony you could photograph, as it 
made fast, not forty feet from you, every 

i45 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

cutter, gig, and launch of every war-ship. 
The late Austrian Club became the head- 
quarters for lost and strayed Americans. 
For four nights, before I secured a room to 
myself by buying the hotel, I slept on the 
sofa. It was two feet too short, but I was 
very fortunate. 

Outside, in the open halls on cots, were 
English, French, Greek, and Serbian officers. 
The place looked like a military hospital. 
The main salon, gilded and bemirrored, had 
lost its identity. At the end overlooking the 
water-front were Serbian ladies taking tea; 
in the centre of the salon at the piano a little 
Greek girl taking a music lesson; and at the 
other end, on cots, British officers from the 
trenches and Serbian officers who had escaped 
through the snows of Albania, their muddy 
boots, uniforms, and swords flung on the 
floor, slept the drugged sleep of exhaustion. 

Meals were a continuous performance and 
interlocked. Except at midnight, dining- 
rooms, cafes, and restaurants were never 

146 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

aired, never swept, never empty. The dishes 
were seldom washed; the waiters — never. 
People succeeded each other at table in re- 
lays, one group giving their order while the 
other was paying the bill. To prepare a 
table, a waiter with a napkin swept every- 
thing on it to the floor. War prices prevailed. 
Even the necessities of life were taxed. For 
a sixpenny tin of English pipe tobacco I paid 
two dollars, and Scotch whiskey rose from 
four francs a bottle to fifteen. On even a 
letter of credit it was next to impossible to 
obtain money, and the man who arrived 
without money in his belt walked the water- 
front. The refugees from Serbia who were 
glad they had escaped with their lives were 
able to sleep and eat only through the charity 
of others. Not only the peasants, but young 
girls and women of the rich, and more care- 
fully nurtured class of Serbians were glad to 
sleep on the ground under tents. 

The scenes in the streets presented the 
most curious contrasts. It was the East 

i47 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

clashing with the West, and the uniforms of 
four armies — British, French, Greek, and 
Serbian — and of the navies of Italy, Russia, 
Greece, England, and France contrasted with 
the dress of civilians of every nation. There 
were the officers of Greece and Serbia in 
smart uniforms of many colors — blue, green, 
gray — with much gold and silver braid, and 
wearing swords which in this war are ob- 
solete; there were English officers, generals 
of many wars, and red-cheeked boys from 
Eton, clad in businesslike khaki, with huge, 
cape-like collars of red fox or wolf skin, and 
carrying, in place of the sword, a hunting- 
crop or a walking-stick; there were English 
bluejackets and marines, Scotch Highlanders, 
who were as much intrigued over the petti- 
coats of the Evzones as were the Greeks as- 
tonished at their bare legs; there were French 
poilus wearing the steel casque, French avia- 
tors in short, shaggy fur coats that gave them 
the look of a grizzly bear balancing on his 
hind legs; there were Jews in gabardines, 

148 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

old men with the noble faces of Sargent's 
apostles, robed exactly as was Irving as 
Shylock; there were the Jewish married 
women in sleeveless cloaks of green silk 
trimmed with rich fur, and each wearing on 
her head a cushion of green that hung below 
her shoulders; there were Greek priests with 
matted hair reaching to the waist, and Turk- 
ish women, their faces hidden in yashmaks, 
who looked through them with horror, or 
envy, at the English, Scotch, and American 
nurses, with their cheeks bronzed by snow, 
sleet, and sun, wearing men's hobnailed boots, 
men's blouses, and, across their breasts, war 
medals for valor. 

All day long these people of all races, with 
conflicting purposes, speaking, or shrieking, 
in a dozen different tongues, pushed, shoved, 
and shouldered. At night, while the bedlam 
of sounds grew less, the picture became 
more wonderful. The lamps of automobiles 
would suddenly pierce the blackness, or the 
blazing doors of a cinema would show in 

149 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

the dark street, the vast crowd pushing, 
slipping, struggling for a foothold on the 
muddy stones. In the circle of light cast by 
the automobiles, out of the mass a single 
face would flash — a face burned by the sun 
of the Dardanelles or frost-bitten by the 
snows of the Balkans. Above it might be 
the gold visor and scarlet band of a "Brass 
Hat," staff -officer, the fur kepi of a Serbian 
refugee, the steel helmet of a French soldier, 
the "bonnet" of a Highlander, the white 
cap of a navy officer, the tassel of an Evzone, 
a red fez, a turban of rags. 

This lasted until the Allies retreated upon 
Salonika, and the Greek army, to give them 
a clear field in which to fight, withdrew, 
100,000 of them in two days, carrying with 
them tens of thousands of civilians — those 
who were pro-Germans, and Greeks, Jews, 
and Serbians. The civilians were flying be- 
fore the expected advance of the Bulgar- 
German forces. But the Central Powers, 
possibly well informed by their spies, did not 

150 



WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA 

attack. That was several months ago, and 
at this writing they have not yet attacked. 
What one man saw of the approaches to 
Salonika from the north leads him to think 
that the longer the attack of the Bulgar- 
Germans is postponed the better it will be — 
for the Bulgar-Germans. 



151 



CHAPTER VII 
TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 

Salonika., December, 1915. 

ON the day the retreat began from Kri- 
volak, General Sarrail, commanding the 
Allies in Serbia, gave us permission to visit 
the French and English front. The French 
advanced position, and a large amount of 
ammunition, six hundred shells to each gun, 
were then at Krivolak, and the English base 
at Doiran. We left the train at Doiran, but 
our French "guide" had not informed the 
English a "mission militaire" was descend- 
ing upon them, and in consequence at Doiran 
there were no conveyances to meet us. So, 
a charming English captain commandeered 
for us a vast motor-truck. Stretched above 
it were ribs to support a canvas top, and by 
clinging to these, as at home on the Elevated 

152 



TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 

we hang to a strap, we managed to avoid 
being bumped out into the road. 

The English captain, who -seemed to have 
nothing else on his hands, volunteered to 
act as our escort, and on a splendid hunter 
galloped ahead of and at the side of the 
lorry, and, much like a conductor on a sight- 
seeing car, pointed out the objects of interest. 
When not explaining he was absent-mindedly 
jumping his horse over swollen streams, 
ravines, and fallen walls. We found him 
much more interesting to watch than the 
scenery. 

The scenery was desolate and bleak. It 
consisted of hills that opened into other 
hills, from the summit of which more hills 
stretched to a horizon entirely of mountains. 
They did not form ridges but, like men in 
a crowd, shouldered into one another. They 
were of a soft rock and covered with snow, 
above which to the height of your waist 
rose scrub pine-trees and bushes of holly. 
The rain and snow that ran down their 

iS3 



TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 

slopes had turned the land into a sea of mud, 
and had swamped the stone roads. In walk- 
ing, for each step you took forward you 
skidded and slid several yards back. If you 
had an hour to spare you had time for a ten- 
minute walk. 

In our motor-truck we circled Lake Doiran, 
and a mile from the station came to a stone 
obelisk. When we passed it our guide on 
horseback shouted to us that we had crossed 
the boundary from Greece, and were now 
in Serbia. The lake is five miles wide and 
landlocked, and the road kept close to the 
water's edge. It led us through little mud 
villages with houses of mud and wattle, and 
some of stone with tiled roofs and rafters, 
and beams showing through the cement. 
The second story projected like those of 
the Spanish blockhouses in Cuba, and the 
log forts from which, in the days when there 
were no hyphenated Americans, our fore- 
fathers fought the Indians. 

Except for some fishermen, the Serbians 
i54 



TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 

had abandoned these villages, and they were 
occupied by English army service men and 
infantry. The "front," which was hidden 
away among the jumble of hills, seemed, 
when we reached it, to consist entirely of 
artillery. All along the road the Tommies 
were waging a hopeless war against the mud, 
shovelling it off the stone road to keep the 
many motor-trucks from skidding over a 
precipice, or against the cold making shelters 
of it, or washing it out of their uniforms and 
off their persons. 

Shivering from ears to heels and with 
teeth rattling, for they had come from the 
Dardanelles, they stood stripped to the waist 
scrubbing their sun-tanned chests and shoul- 
ders with ice-water. It was a spectacle that 
inspired confidence. When a man is so keen 
after water to wash in that he will kick the 
top off a frozen lake to get it, a little thing 
like a barb-wire entanglement will not halt 
him. 

The cold of those hills was like no cold I 
i5S 



TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 

had ever felt. Officers who had hunted in 
northern Russia, in the Himalayas, in Alaska, 
assured us that never had they so suffered. 
The men we passed, who were in the am- 
bulances, were down either with pneumonia 
or frost-bite. Many had lost toes and fingers. 
And it was not because they were not warmly 
clad.* 

Last winter in France had taught the war 
office how to dress the part; but nothing 
had prepared them for the cold of the Bal- 
kans. And to add to their distress, for it 
was all of that, there was no fire-wood. 
The hills were bare of trees, and such cold 
as they endured could not be fought with 
green twigs. 

It was not the brisk, invigorating cold 

* It has been charged that the British troops in the Bal- 
kans wore the same tropic uniforms they wore in the Dar- 
danelles. This was necess'arily true, when first they landed, 
but almost at once the winter uniform was issued to all of 
them. I saw no British or French soldier who was not 
properly and warmly clad, with overcoat, muffler, extra 
waistcoat, and gloves. And while all, both officers and men, 
cursed the cold, none complained that he had not been ap- 
propriately clothed to meet it. R. H. D. 

156 



TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 

that invites you out of doors. It had no 
cheery, healthful appeal to skates, tobog- 
gans, and the jangling bells of a cutter. It 
was the damp, clammy, penetrating cold of 
a dungeon, of an unventilated ice-chest, of 
a morgue. Your clothes did not warm you, 
the heat of your body had to warm your 
clothes. And warm, also, all of the surround- 
ing hills. 

Between the road and the margin of the 
lake were bamboo reeds as tall as lances, 
and at the edge of these were gathered 
myriads of ducks. The fishermen were en- 
gaged in bombarding the ducks with rocks. 
They went about this in a methodical fashion. 
All around the lake, concealed in the reeds 
and lifted a few feet above the water they 
had raised huts on piles. In front of these 
huts was a ledge or balcony. They looked 
like overgrown bird-houses on stilts. 

One fisherman waited in a boat to pick 
up the dead ducks, and the other hurled 
stones from a sling. It was the same kind 

iS7 



TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 

of a sling as the one with which David slew 
Goliath. In Athens I saw small .boys using 
it to throw stones at an electric-light pole. 
The one the fisherman used was about eight 
feet long. To get the momentum he whirled 
it swiftly above his head as a cowboy swings 
a lariat, and then let one end fly loose, and 
the stone, escaping, smashed into the mass of 
ducks. If it stunned or killed a duck the 
human water-spaniel in the boat would row 
out and retrieve it. To duck hunters at 
home the sport would chiefly recommend 
itself through the cheapness of the am- 
munition. 

On the road we met relays of water-carts 
and wagons that had been up the hills with 
food for the gunners at the front; and en- 
gineers were at work repairing the stone 
bridges or digging detours to avoid those 
that had disappeared. They had been built 
to support no greater burden than a flock of 
sheep, an ox-cart, or what a donkey can carry 
on his back, and the assault of the British 

158 



TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 

motor-trucks and French six-inch guns had 
driven them deep into the mud. 

After ten miles we came to what a staff 
officer would call an "advanced base," but 
which was locally designated the "Dump." 
At the side of the road, much of it uncov- 
ered to the snow, were stores of ammuni- 
tion, "bully beef," and barb-wire. The camp 
bore all the signs of a temporary halting 
place. It was just what the Tommies called 
it, a dump. We had not been told then that 
the Allies were withdrawing, but one did not 
have to be a military expert to see that there 
was excellent reason why they should. 

They were so few. Whatever the force 
was against them, the force I saw was not 
strong enough to hold the ground, not that 
it covered, but over which it was sprinkled. 
There were outposts without supports, sup- 
ports without reserves. A squad was ex- 
pected to perform the duties of a company. 
Where a brigade was needed there was less 
than a battalion. Against the white masses 

iS9 



TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 

of the mountains and the desolate landscape 
without trees, houses, huts, without any 
sign of human habitation, the scattered 
groups of khaki only accented the bleak 
loneliness. 

At the dump we had exchanged for the 
impromptu motor-truck, automobiles of the 
French staff, and as "Jimmie" Hare and I 
were alone in one of them we could stop 
where we liked. So we halted where an Eng- 
lish battery was going into action. It had 
dug itself into the side of a hill and covered 
itself with snow and pine branches. Some- 
where on one of the neighboring hills the 
"spotter" was telephoning the range. The 
gunners could not see at what they were 
firing. They could see only the high hill of 
rock and snow, at the base of which they 
stood shoulder high in their mud cellars. 
Ten yards to the rear of them was what 
looked like a newly made grave reverently 
covered with pine boughs. Through these a 
rat-faced young man, with the receivers of 

1 60 




From a photograph by William G. Shepherd. 



John T. McCutcheon. 

Richard Harding Davis. 



John F. Bass. 

James H. Hare. 



American war correspondents at the French front in Serbia. 



TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 

a telephone clamped to his ears, pushed his 
head. 

"Eight degrees to the left, sir," he barked, 
"four thousand yards." 

The men behind the guns were extremely 
young, but, like most artillerymen, alert, 
sinewy, springing to their appointed tasks 
with swift, catlike certainty. The sight of 
the two strangers seemed to surprise them as 
much as the man in the grave had startled 
us. 

There were two boy officers in command, 
one certainly not yet eighteen, his superior 
officer still under twenty. 

"I suppose you're all right," said the 
younger one. "You couldn't have got this 
far if you weren't all right." 

He tried to scowl upon us, but he was not 
successful. He was too lonely, too honestly 
glad to see any one from beyond the moun- 
tains that hemmed him in. They stretched 
on either side of him to vast distances, massed 
barriers of white against a gray, sombre 

161 



TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 

sky; in front of him, to be exact, just four 
thousand yards in front of him, were Bul- 
garians he had never seen, but who were al- 
ways with their shells ordering to "move on," 
and behind him lay a muddy road that led 
to a rail-head, that led to transports, that led 
to France, to the Channel, and England. It 
was a long, long way to England. I felt like 
taking one of the boy officers under each arm, 
and smuggling him safely home to his mother. 

"You don't seem to have any supports," 
I ventured. 

The child gazed around him. It was grow- 
ing dark and gloomier, and the hollows of the 
white hills were filled with shadows. His 
men were listening, so he said bravely, with 
a vague sweep of the hand at the encircling 
darkness, "Oh, they're about — somewhere. 
You might call this," he added, with pride, 
"an independent command." 

You well might. 

"Report when ready!" chanted his supe- 
rior officer, aged nineteen. 

162 



TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 

He reported, and then the guns spoke, 
making a great flash in the twilight. 

In spite of the light, Jimmie Hare was 
trying to make a photograph of the guns. 

"Take it on the recoil," advised the child 
officer. "It's sure to stick. It always does 
stick." 

The men laughed, not slavishly, because 
the officer had made a joke, but as com- 
panions in trouble, and because when you 
are abandoned on a mountainside with a 
lame gun that jams, you must not take it 
lying down, but make a joke of it. 

The French chauffeur was pumping his 
horn for us to return, and I went, shame- 
facedly, as must the robbers who deserted 
the babes in the wood. 

In farewell I offered the boy officer the 
best cigars for sale in Greece, which is the 
worse thing one can say of any cigar. I 
apologized for them, but explained he must 
take them because they were called the 
"King of England." 

163 



TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY 



"I would take them," said the infant, 
"if they were called the 'German Em- 
peror. ' " 

At the door of the car we turned and 
waved, and the two infants waved back. 
I felt I had meanly deserted them — that 
for his life the mother of each could hold me 
to account. 

But as we drove away from the cellars of 
mud, the gun that stuck, and the "indepen- 
dent command," I could see in the twilight 
the flashes of the guns and two lonely specks 
of light. 

They were the "King of England" cigars 
burning bravely. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT IN 
SERBIA 

Salonika, December, 19 15. 

THE chauffeur of an army automobile 
must make his way against cavalry, artil- 
lery, motor-trucks, motor-cycles, men march- 
ing, and ambulances filled with wounded, 
over a road torn by thousand-ton lorries and 
excavated by washouts and Jack Johnsons. 
It is therefore necessary for him to drive 
with care. So he drives at sixty miles an 
hour, and tries to scrape the mud from every 
wheel he meets. 

In these days of his downfall the greatest 
danger to the life of the war correspondent 
is that he must move about in automobiles 
driven by military chauffeurs. The one who 
drove me from the extreme left of the Eng- 
lish front up to hill 516, which was the highest 

165 



THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT 

point of the French front, told me that in 
peace times he drove a car to amuse himself. 
His idea of amusing himself was to sweep 
around a corner on one wheel, exclaim with 
horror, and throw on all the brakes with the 
nose of the car projecting over a precipice a 
thousand yards deep. He knew perfectly- 
well the precipice was there, but he leaped 
at it exactly as though it were the finish line 
of the Vanderbilt cup race. If his idea of 
amusing himself was to make me sick with 
terror he must have spent a thoroughly en- 
joyable afternoon. 

The approaches to hill 516, the base of 
the hill on the side hidden from the Bul- 
garians, and the trenches dug into it were 
crowded with the French. At that point of 
the line they greatly outnumbered the Eng- 
lish. But it was not the elbow touch of 
numbers that explained their cheerfulness; 
it was because they knew it was expected of 
them. The famous scholar who wrote in 
our school geographies, "The French are a 

166 



IN SERBIA 

gay people, fond of dancing and light wines," 
established a tradition. And on hill 516, 
although it was to keep from freezing that 
they danced, and though the light wines 
were melted snow, they still kept up that 
tradition and were "gay." 

They laughed at us in welcome, crawling 
out of their igloos on all fours like bears out 
of a cave; they laughed when we photo- 
graphed them crowding to get in front of 
the camera, when we scattered among them 
copies of U Opinion, when up the snow-clad 
hillside we skidded and slipped and fell. 
And if we peered into the gloom of the shel- 
ters, where they crouched on the frozen 
ground with snow dripping from above, 
with shoulders pressed against walls of icy 
mud, they waved spoons at us and invited 
us to share their soup. Even the dark- 
skinned, sombre-eyed men of the desert, the 
tall Moors and Algerians, showed their white 
teeth and laughed when a "seventy-five" 
exploded from an unsuspicious bush, and we 

167 



THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT 

jumped. It was like a camp of Boy Scouts, 
picnicking for one day, and sure the same 
night of a warm supper and bed. But the 
best these poilus might hope for was months 
of ice, snow, and mud, of discomfort, colds, 
long marches carrying heavy burdens, the 
pain of frost-bite, and, worst of all, home- 
sickness. They were sure of nothing: not 
even of the next minute. For hill 516 was 
dotted with oblong rows of stones with, at 
one end, a cross of green twigs and a sol- 
dier's cap. 

The hill was the highest point of a ridge 
that looked down into the valleys of the Var- 
dar and of Bodjinia. Toward the Bulgarians 
we could see the one village of Kosturino, 
almost indistinguishable against the snow, 
and for fifty miles, even with glasses, no other 
sign of life. Nothing but hills, rocks, bushes, 
and snow. When the "seventy-fives" spoke 
with their smart, sharp crack that always 
seems to say, "Take that !" and to add, with 

aristocratic insolence, "and be damned to 

x68 



IN SERBIA 

you!" one could not guess what they were 
firing at. In Champagne, where the Germans 
were as near as from a hundred to forty yards; 
in Artois, where they were a mile distant, but 
where their trench was as clearly in sight 
as the butts of a rifle-range, you could un- 
derstand. You knew that "that dark line 
over there" was the enemy. 

A year before at Soissons you had seen 
the smoke of the German guns in a line 
fifteen miles long. In other little wars you 
had watched the shells destroy a blockhouse, 
a village, or burst upon a column of men. 
But from hill 516 you could see no enemy; 
only mountains draped in snow, silent, empty, 
inscrutable. It seemed ridiculous to be at- 
tacking fifty miles of landscape with tiny 
pills of steel. But although we could not 
see the Bulgars, they could see the flashes 
on hill 516, and from somewhere out of the 
inscrutable mountains shells burst and fell. 
They fell very close, within forty feet of us, 
and, like children being sent to bed just at 

169 



THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT 

dessert time, our hosts hurried us out of the 
trenches and drove us away. 

While on "516" we had been in Bul- 
garia; now we returned to Serbia, and were 
halted at the village of Valandova. There 
had been a ceremony that afternoon. A 
general, whose name we may not mention, 
had received the medaille militaire. One 
of the French correspondents asked him in 
recognition of which of his victories it had 
been bestowed. The general possessed a 
snappy temper. 

"The medal was given me," he said, "be- 
cause I was the only general without it, and 
I was becoming conspicuous." 

It had long been dark when we reached 
Strumnitza station, where we were to spend 
the night in a hospital tent. The tent was 
as big as a barn, with a stove, a cot for each, 
and fresh linen sheets. All these good things 
belong to the men we had left on hill 516 
awake in the mud and snow. I felt like a 
burglar, who, while the owner is away, sleeps 

170 



IN SERBIA 

in his bed. There was another tent with a 
passageway filled with medical supplies con- 
necting it with ours. It was in darkness, and 
we thought it empty until some one explor- 
ing found it crowded with wounded and men 
with frozen legs and hands. For half an 
hour they had been watching us through the 
passageway, making no sign, certainly mak- 
ing no complaint. John Bass collected all 
our newspapers, candles, and boxes of ciga- 
rettes, which the hospital stewards distrib- 
uted, and when we returned from dinner our 
neighbors were still wide awake and holding 
a smoking concert. But when in the morn- 
ing the bugles woke us we found that during 
the night the wounded had been spirited 
away, and by rail transferred to the hospital 
ships. We should have known then that the 
army was in retreat. But it was all so orderly, 
so leisurely, that it seemed like merely a shift- 
ing from one point of the front to another. 

We dined with the officers and they cer- 
tainly gave no suggestion of men contemplat- 

171 



THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT 

ing retreat, for the mess-hall in which dinner 
was served had been completed only that 
afternoon. It was of rough stones and cement, 
and the interior walls were covered with white- 
wash. The cement was not yet dry, nor, as 
John McCutcheon later discovered when he 
drew caricatures on it, neither was the white- 
wash. There were twenty men around the 
dinner-table, seated on ammunition-boxes 
and Standard Oil cans, and so close together 
you could use only one hand. So, you gave 
up trying to cut your food, and used the 
free hand solely in drinking toasts to the 
army, to France, and the Allies. Then, to 
each Ally individually. You were glad there 
were so many Allies. For it was not Greek, 
but French wine, of the kind that comes 
from Rheims. And the army was retreating. 
What the French army offers its guests to 
drink when it is advancing is difficult to 
imagine. 

We were waited upon by an enormous 
negro from Senegal with a fez as tall as a 

172 




From a photograph by R. H. Davis. 

Headquarters of the French commander in Grevac, Serbia. 



IN SERBIA 

giant firecracker. Waiting single-handed on 
twenty men is a serious matter. And be- 
cause the officers laughed when he served the 
soup in a tin basin used for washing dishes 
his feelings were hurt. It was explained that 
"Chocolat" in his own country was a prince, 
and that unless treated with tact he might 
get the idea that waiting on a table is not a 
royal prerogative. One of the officers was a 
genius at writing impromptu verses. During 
one course he would write them, and while 
Chocolat was collecting the plates would 
sing them. Then by the light of a candle on 
the back of a scrap of paper he would write 
another and sing that. He was rivalled in 
entertaining us by the officers who told 
anecdotes of war fronts from the Marne to 
Smyrna, who proposed toasts, and made 
speeches in response, especially by the of- 
ficer who that day had received the Croix 
de Guerre and a wound. 

I sat next to a young man who had been 
talking learnedly of dumdum bullets and 

i73 



THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT 

Parisian restaurants. They asked him to 
recite, and to my horror he rose. Until 
that moment he had been a serious young 
officer, talking boulevard French. In an 
instant he was transformed. He was a 
clown. To look at him was to laugh. He 
was an old roue, senile, pitiable, a bourgeois, 
an apache, a lover, and his voice was so 
beautiful that each sentence sang. He used 
words so difficult that to avoid them even 
Frenchmen will cross the street. He mas- 
tered them, played with them, caressed them, 
sipped of them as a connoisseur sips Madeira: 
he tossed them into the air like radiant 
bubbles, or flung them at us with the rattle 
of a mitrailleuse. When in triumph he sat 
down, I asked him, when not in uniform, 
who the devil he happened to be. 

Again he was the bored young man. In a 
low tone, so as not to expose my ignorance to 
others, he said. 

"I? I am Barrielles of the Theatre 
Odeon." 

i74 



IN SERBIA 

We were receiving so much that to make 
no return seemed ungracious, and we in- 
sisted that John T. McCutcheon should 
decorate the wall of the new mess-room with 
the caricatures that make the Chicago Trib- 
une famous. Our hosts were delighted, 
but it was hardly fair to McCutcheon. In- 
stead of his own choice of weapons he was 
asked to prove his genius on wet whitewash 
with a stick of charred wood. It was like 
asking McLaughlin to make good on a 
ploughed field. But in spite of the fact 
that the whitewash fell off in flakes, there 
grew upon the wall a tall, gaunt figure with 
gleaming eyes and teeth. Chocolat paid it 
the highest compliment. He gave a wild 
howl and fled into the night. Then in quick 
succession, while the Frenchmen applauded 
each swift stroke, appeared the faces of the 
song writer, the comedian, the wounded man, 
and the commanding officer. It was a real 
triumph, but the surprises of the evening 
were not at an end. McCutcheon had but 

*7S 



THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT 

just resumed his seat when the newly finished 
rear wall of the mess-hall crashed into the 
room. Where had been rocks and cement 
was a gaping void, and a view of a garden 
white with snow. 

While we were rescuing the song writer 
from the debris McCutcheon regarded the 
fallen wall thoughtfully. 

"They feared," he said, " I was going to dec- 
orate that wall also, and they sent Chocolat 
outside to push it in." 

The next day we walked along the bank 
of the Vardar River to Gravec, about five 
miles north of Strumnitza station. Five 
miles farther was Demir-Kapu, the Gate of 
Iron, and between these two towns is a high 
and narrow pass famous for its wild and mag- 
nificent beauty. Fifteen miles beyond that 
was Krivolak, the most advanced French 
position. On the hills above Gravec were 
many guns, but in the town itself only a 
few infantrymen. It was a town entirely 
of mud; the houses, the roads, and the people 

176 




■3 ^ :5 



IN SERBIA 

were covered with it. Gravec is proud only 
of its church, on the walls of which in colors 
still rich are painted many devils with pitch- 
forks driving the wicked ones into the flames. 

One of the poilus put his finger on the 
mass of wicked ones. 

"Les Bodies," he explained. 

Whether the devils were the French or 
the English he did not say, possibly because 
at the moment they were more driven against 
than driving. 

Major Merse, the commanding officer, in- 
vited us to his headquarters. They were in 
a house of stone and mud, from which pro- 
jected a wooden platform. When any one 
appeared upon it he had the look of being 
about to make a speech. The major asked 
us to take photographs of Gravec and send 
them to his wife. He wanted her to see in 
what sort of a place he was condemned to 
exist during the winter. He did not wish 
her to think of him as sitting in front of a 
cafe on the sidewalk, and the snap-shots 

177 



THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT 

would show her that Gravec has no cafes, 
no sidewalks and no streets. 

But he was not condemned to spend the 
winter in Gravec. 

Within the week great stores of ammuni- 
tion and supplies began to pour into it from 
Krivolak, and the Gate of Iron became the 
advanced position, and Gravec suddenly- 
found herself of importance as the French 
base. 

To understand this withdrawal, find on 
the map Krivolak, and follow the railroad 
and River Vardar southeast to Gravec. 

The cause of the retreat was the inability 
of the Serbians to hold Monastir and their 
withdrawal west, which left a gap in the 
former line of Serbians, French, and British. 
The enemy thus was south and west of 
Sarrail, and his left flank was exposed. 

On December 3, finding the advanced posi- 
tion at Krivolak threatened by four divisions, 
100,000 men, General Sarrail began the with- 
drawal, sending south by rail without loss 

178 



IN SERBIA 

all ammunition and stores. He destroyed 
the tunnel at Krivolak and all the bridges 
across the Vardar, and on his left at the 
Cerna River. The fighting was heavy at 
Prevedo and Biserence, but the French losses 
were small. He withdrew slowly, twenty 
miles in one week. The British also with- 
drew from their first line to their second line 
of defense. 

Demir-Kapu, meaning the Gate of Iron, 
is the entrance to a valley celebrated for its 
wild and magnificent beauty. Starting at 
Demir-Kapu, it ends two kilometres north 
of Gravec. It rises on either side of the 
Vardar River and railroad line, and in places 
is less than a hundred yards wide. It is 
formed of sheer hills of rock, treeless and 
exposed. 

But the fame of Gravec as the French 
base was short-lived. For the Serbians at 
Monastir and Gevgeli, though fighting 
bravely, were forced toward Albania, leav- 
ing the left flank of Sarrail still more ex- 

179 



THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT 

posed. And the Gate of Iron belied her an- 
cient title. 

With 100,000 Bulgars crowding down 
upon him General Sarrail wasted no lives, 
either French or English, but again with- 
drew. He was outnumbered, some say five 
to one. In any event, he was outnumbered 
as inevitably as three of a kind beat two 
pair. A good poker player does not waste 
chips backing two pair. Neither should a 
good general, when his chips are human 
lives. As it was, in the retreat seven hundred 
French were killed or wounded, and of the 
British, who were more directly in the path 
of the Bulgars, one thousand. 

At Gevgeli the French delayed two days 
to allow the Serbian troops to get away, and 
then themselves withdrew. There now no 
longer were any Serbian soldiers in Serbia. 
So both armies fell back toward Salonika on 
a line between Kilindir and Doiran railroad- 
station, and all the places we visited a week 
before were occupied by the enemy. At 

1 80 



IN SERBIA 

Gravec a Bulgarian is pointing at the wicked 
ones who are being driven into the flames 
and saying: "The Allies," and at Strum- 
nitza station in the mess-hall Bulgar officers 
are framing John McCutcheon's sketches. 

And here at Salonika from sunrise to sun- 
set the English are disembarking reinforce- 
ments, and the French building barracks of 
stone and brick. It looks as though the 
French were here to stay, and as though the 
retreating habit was broken. 

The same team that, to put it politely, 
drew the enemy after them to the gates of 
Paris, have been drawing the same enemy 
after them to Salonika. That, they will 
throw him back from Salonika, as they 
threw him back from Paris, is assured. 

General Sarrail was one of those who 
commanded in front of Paris, and General 
de Castelnau, who also commanded at the 
battle of the Marne, and is now chief of staff 
of General Joffre, has just visited him here. 
General de Castelnau was sent to "go, look, 

181 



THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT 

see." He reports that the position now 
held by the Allies is impregnable. 

The perimeter held by them is fifty miles 
in length and stretches from the Vardar 
River on the west to the Gulf of Orplanos 
on the east. There are three lines of de- 
fense. To assist the first two on the east 
are Lakes Beshik and Langaza, on the west 
the Vardar River. Should the enemy pene- 
trate the first lines they will be confronted 
ten miles from Salonika by a natural bar- 
rier of hills, and ten miles of intrenchments 
and barb-wire. Should the enemy surmount 
these hills the Allies war-ships in the harbor 
can sweep him off them as a fire-hose rips 
the shingles off a roof. 

The man who tells you he understands the 
situation in Salonika is of the same mental 
caliber as the one who understands a system 
for beating the game at Monte Carlo. But 
there are certain rumors as to the situation 
in the future that can be eliminated. First, 
Greece will not turn against the Allies. 

182 



IN SERBIA 

Second, the Allies will not withdraw from 
Salonika. They now are agreed it is better 
to resist an attack or stand a siege, even if 
they lose 200,000 men, than to withdraw 
from the Balkans without a fight. 

The Briand government believes that had 
the Millerand government, which it over- 
threw, sent troops to aid the Serbian army 
in August this war would have been made 
shorter by six months. It now is trying to 
repair the mistake of the government it 
ousted. Among other reasons it has for 
remaining in the Balkans, is that the pres- 
ence of 200,000 men at Salonika will hold 
Roumania from any aggressive movement 
on Russia. 

To aid the Allies, Russia at Tannenberg 
made a sacrifice, and lost 200,000 men. 
The present French Government now feels 
bound in honor to help Russia by keeping 
the French-British armies at Salonika. As 
a visiting member of the government said 
to me: 

183 



THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT 

"In this war there is no western line or 
eastern line. The line of the Allies is wherever 
a German attacks. France went to the Bal- 
kans to help Serbia. She went too late, 
which is not the fault of the present govern- 
ment. But there remains the task to keep 
the Germans from Egypt, to menace the rail- 
road at Adrianople, and to prevent Rou- 
mania from an attack upon the flank of 
Russia. The Allies are in Salonika until this 
war is ended/' 

In Salonika you see every evidence that 
this is the purpose of the Allies; that both 
England and France are determined to hold 
fast. 

Reinforcements of British troops are ar- 
riving daily, and the French are importing 
large numbers of ready-to-set-up wooden 
barracks, each capable of holding 250 men. 
Also along the water-front they are build- 
ing storehouses of brick and stone. That 
does not suggest an immediate departure. 
At the French camp, which covers five square 

184 



IN SERBIA 

miles in the suburbs of Salonika when I 
visited it to-day, thousands of soldiers were 
actively engaged in laying stone roads, re- 
pairing bridges and erecting new ones. There 
is no question but that they intend to make 
this the base until the advance in the spring. 

A battalion of Serbians 700 strong has 
arrived at the French camp. In size and 
physique they are splendid specimens of 
fighting men. They are now road building. 
Each day refugees of the Serbian army add 
to their number. 

At four o'clock in the morning of the 14th 
of December, the Greek army evacuated Sa- 
lonika and that strip of Greek territory 
stretching from it to Doiran. 

From before sunrise an unbroken column 
of Greek regiments passed beneath the win- 
dows of our hotel. There were artillery, 
cavalry, pontoons, ambulances, and thou- 
sands of ponies and donkeys, carrying fod- 
der, supplies, and tents. The sidewalks were 
invaded by long lines of infantry. The 

185 



THE FRENCH-BRITISH FRONT 

water-front along which the column passed 
was blocked with spectators. 

As soon as the Greeks had departed sailors 
from the Allied war-ships were given shore 
leave, and the city took on the air of a holi- 
day. Thus was a most embarrassing situa- 
tion brought to an end and the world in- 
formed that the Allies had but just begun to 
fight. It was the clearing of the prize-ring. 

The clearing also of the enemy's consulates 
ended another embarrassing situation. As 
suggested in a previous chapter, the con- 
sulates of the Central Powers were the hot- 
beds and clearing-houses for spies. The 
raid upon them by the French proved that 
this was true. The enforced departure of 
the German, Austrian, Bulgarian, and Turk- 
ish consuls added to the responsibilities of 
our own who has now to guard their in- 
terests. They will be efficiently served. 
John E. Kehl has been long in our consular 
service, and is most admirably fitted to 
meet the present crisis. He has been our 

1 86 



IN SERBIA 

representative at Salonika for four years, in 
which time his experience as consul during 
the Italian-Turkish War, the two Balkan 
wars, and the present war, have trained 
him to meet any situation that is likely to 
arrive. 

What that situation may be, whether the 
Bulgar-Germans will attack Salonika, or the 
Allies will advance upon Sofia, and as an 
inevitable sequence draw after them the 
Greek army of 200,000 veterans, only the 
spring can tell. 

If the Teutons mean to advance, having 
the shorter distance to go, they may launch 
their attack in April. The Allies, if Sofia 
is their objective, will wait for the snow to 
leave the hills and the roads to dry. That 
they would move before May is doubtful. 
Meanwhile, they are accumulating many men, 
and much ammunition and information. May 
they make good use of it. 



187 



CHAPTER IX 

VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

Paris, January, 1916. 

IT is an old saying that the busiest man 
always seems to have the most leisure. 
It is another way of complimenting him on 
his genius for organization. When you visit 
a real man of affairs you seldom find him 
surrounded by secretaries, stenographers, and 
a battery of telephones. As a rule, there is 
nothing on his desk save a photograph of 
his wife and a rose in a glass of water. Out- 
side the headquarters of the general there 
were no gendarmes, no sentries, no panting 
automobiles, no mud-flecked chasseurs-a- 
cheval. Unchallenged the car rolled up an 
empty avenue of trees and stopped beside 
an empty terrace of an apparently empty 
chateau. At one end of the terrace was a 
pond, and in it floated seven beautiful swans. 

188 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

They were the only living things in sight. I 
thought we had stumbled upon the country 
home of some gentleman of elegant leisure. 

When he appeared the manner of the 
general assisted that impression. His cour- 
tesy was so undisturbed, his mind so tranquil, 
his conversation so entirely that of the polite 
host, you felt he was masquerading in the 
uniform of a general only because he knew it 
was becoming. He glowed with health and 
vigor. He had the appearance of having 
just come indoors after a satisfactory round 
on his private golf-links. Instead, he had 
been receiving reports from twenty-four dif- 
ferent staff-officers. His manner suggested 
he had no more serious responsibility than 
feeding bread crumbs to the seven stately 
swans. Instead he was responsible for the 
lives of 170,000 men and fifty miles of trenches. 
His duties were to feed the men three times 
a day with food, and all day and night with 
ammunition, to guard them against attacks 
from gases, burning oil, bullets, shells; and 

189 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

in counter-attack to send them forward with 
the bayonet across hurdles of barb-wire to 
distribute death. These were only a few of 
his responsiblities. 

I knew somewhere in the chateau there 
must be the conning-tower from which the 
general directed his armies, and after luncheon 
asked to be allowed to visit it. It was filled 
with maps, in size enormous but rich in tiny 
details, nailed on frames, pinned to the walls, 
spread over vast drawing-boards. But to 
the visitor more marvellous than the maps 
showing the French lines were those in which 
were set forth the German positions, marked 
with the place occupied by each unit, giving 
the exact situation of the German trenches, 
the German batteries, giving the numerals 
of each regiment. With these spread before 
him, the general has only to lift the hand 
telephone, and direct that from a spot on 
a map on one wall several tons of explosive 
shells shall drop on a spot on another map 
on the wall opposite. The general does not 

190 







The ruined village of Gerbeviller, destroyed after their retreat 

by the Germans. 
Captain Gabriel Puaux, of the General-Headquarters Staff, and Mr. Davis. 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

fight only at long distance from a map. 
Each morning he visits some part of the 
fifty miles of trenches. What later he sees 
on his map only jogs his memory. It is a 
sort of shorthand note. Where to you are 
waving lines, dots, and crosses, he beholds 
valleys, forests, miles of yellow trenches. A 
week ago, during a bombardment, a brother 
general advanced into the first trench. His 
chief of staff tugged at his cloak. 

"My men like to see me here," said the 
general. 

A shell killed him. But who can protest 
it was a life wasted? He made it possible 
for every poilu in a trench of five hundred 
miles to say: "Our generals do not send us 
where they will not go themselves.' ' 

We left the white swans smoothing their 
feathers, and through rain drove to a hill 
covered closely with small trees. The trees 
were small, because the soil from which they 
drew sustenance was only one to three feet 
deep. Beneath that was chalk. Through 

191 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

these woods was cut a runway for a toy 
railroad. It possessed the narrowest of nar- 
row gauges, and its rolling-stock consisted 
of flat cars three feet wide, drawn by splen- 
did Percherons. The live stock, the rolling- 
stock, the tracks, and the trees on either side 
of the tracks were entirely covered with 
white clay. Even the brakemen and the 
locomotive-engineer who walked in advance 
of the horses were completely painted with 
it. And before we got out of the woods, so 
were the passengers. This railroad feeds 
the trenches, carrying to them water and 
ammunition, and to the kitchens in the rear 
uncooked food. 

The French marquis who escorted "Mon 
Capitaine" of the Grand Quartier General 
des Armees, who was my "guide philosopher 
and friend," to the trenches either had built 
this railroad, or owned a controlling interest 
in it, for he always spoke of it proudly as 
"my express," "my special train," "my 
petite vitesse." He had lately been in Amer- 
ica buying cavalry horses. 

192 




-fl * 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

As for years he has owned one of the 
famous racing stables in France, his knowl- 
edge of them is exceptional. 

When last I had seen him he was in silk, 
on one of his own thoroughbreds, and the 
crowd, or that part of it that had backed his 
horse, was applauding, and, while he waited 
for permission to dismount, he was smiling 
and laughing. Yesterday, when the plough 
horses pulled his express-train off the rails, 
he descended and pushed it back, and, in 
consequence, was splashed, not by the mud 
of the race-track but of the trenches. Nor 
in the misty, dripping, rain-soaked forest 
was there any one to applaud. But he was 
still laughing, even more happily. 

The trenches were dug around what had 
been a chalk mine, and it was difficult to 
tell where the mining for profit had stopped 
and the excavations for defense began. When 
you can see only chalk at your feet, and chalk 
on either hand, and overhead the empty 
sky, this ignorance may be excused. In 
the boyaux, which began where the railroad 

193 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

stopped, that was our position. We walked 
through an endless grave with walls of clay, 
on top of which was a scant foot of earth. 
It looked like a layer of chocolate on the 
top of a cake. 

In some places, underfoot was a cordu- 
roy path of sticks, like the false bottom of 
a rowboat; in others, we splashed through 
open sluices of clay and rain-water. You 
slid and skidded, and to hold yourself erect 
pressed with each hand against the wet walls 
of the endless grave. 

We came out upon the "hauts de Meuse." 
They are called also the "Shores of Lor- 
raine," because to that province, as are the 
cliffs of Dover to the county of Kent, they 
form a natural barrier. We were in the quarry 
that had been cut into the top of the heights 
on the side that now faces other heights held 
by the enemy. Behind us rose a sheer wall 
of chalk as high as a five-story building. 
The face of it had been pounded by shells. 
It was as undismayed as the whitewashed 

194 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

wall of a schoolroom at which generations 
of small boys have flung impertinent spit- 
balls. At the edge of the quarry the floor 
was dug deeper, leaving a wall between it 
and the enemy, and behind this wall were 
the posts of observation, the nests of the 
machine-guns, the raised step to which the 
men spring when repulsing an attack. Be- 
low and back of them were the shelters into 
which, during a bombardment, they disap- 
pear. They were roofed with great beams, 
on top of which were bags of cement piled 
three and four yards high. 

Not on account of the sleet and fog, but 
in spite of them, the aspect of the place was 
grim and forbidding. You did not see, as 
at some of the other fronts, on the sign- 
boards that guide the men through the 
maze, jokes and nicknames. The mess-huts 
and sleeping-caves bore no such ironic titles 
as the Petit Cafe, the Anti-Boche, Chez 
Maxim. They were designated only by 
numerals, businesslike and brief. It was no 

i9S 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

place for humor. The monuments to the 
dead were too much in evidence. On every 
front the men rise and lie down with death, 
but on no other front had I found them 
living so close to the graves of their former 
comrades. Where a man had fallen, there 
had he been buried, and on every hand you 
saw between the chalk huts, at the mouths 
of the pits or raised high in a niche, a pile 
of stones, a cross, and a soldier's cap. Where 
one officer had fallen his men had built to 
his memory a mausoleum. It is also a shelter 
into which, when the shells come, they dive 
for safety. So that even in death he pro- 
tects them. 

I was invited into a post of observation, 
and told to make my entrance quickly. 
In order to exist, a post of observation must 
continue to look to the enemy only like 
part of the wall of earth that faces him. If 
through its apparently solid front there flashes, 
even for an instant, a ray of sunlight, he 
knows that the ray comes through a peep- 

196 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

hole, and that behind the peep-hole men 
with field-glasses are watching him. And 
with his shells he hammers the post of obser- 
vation into a shambles. Accordingly, when 
you enter one, it is etiquette not to keep the 
door open any longer than is necessary to 
squeeze past it. As a rule, the door is a 
curtain of sacking, but hands and bodies 
coated with clay, by brushing against it, 
have made it quite opaque. 

The post was as small as a chart-room, 
and the light came only through the peep- 
holes. You got a glimpse of a rack of rifles, 
of shadowy figures that made way for you, 
and of your captain speaking in a whisper. 
When you put your eyes to the peep-hole 
it was like looking at a photograph through 
a stereoscope. But, instead of seeing the 
lake of Geneva, the Houses of Parliament, 
or Niagara Falls, you looked across a rain- 
driven valley of mud, on the opposite side of 
which was a hill. 

Here the reader kindly will imagine a 
197 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

page of printed matter devoted to that hill. 
It was an extremely interesting hill, but my 
captain, who also is my censor, decides that 
what I wrote was too interesting, especially 
to Germans. So the hill is "strafed." He 
says I can begin again vaguely with "Over 
there." 

"Over there," said his voice in the dark- 
ness, "is St. Mihiel." 

For more than a year you had read of 
St. Mihiel. Communiques, maps, illustra- 
tions had made it famous and familiar. It 
was the town that gave a name to the Ger- 
man salient, to the point thrust in advance 
of what should be his front. You expected 
to see an isolated hill, a promontory, some 
position of such strategic value as would 
explain why for St. Mihiel the lives of thou- 
sands of Germans had been thrown upon 
the board. But except for the obstinacy of 
the German mind, or, upon the part of the 
Crown Prince the lack of it, I could find no 
explanation. Why the German wants to 

198 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

hold St. Mihiel, why he ever tried to hold 
it, why if it so pleases him he should not 
continue to hold it until his whole line is 
driven across the border, is difficult to under- 
stand. For him it is certainly an expensive 
position. It lengthens his lines of communi- 
cation and increases his need of transport. 
It eats up men, eats up rations, eats up 
priceless ammunition, and it leads to no- 
where, enfilades no position, threatens no 
one. It is like an ill-mannered boy sticking 
out his tongue. And as ineffective. 

The physical aspect of St. Mihiel is a 
broad sweep of meadow-land cut in half by 
the Meuse flooding her banks; and the 
shattered houses of the Ferme Mont Meuse, 
which now form the point of the salient. 
At this place the opposing trenches are only 
a hundred yards apart, and all of this low 
ground is commanded by the French guns 
on the heights of Les Paroches. On the day 
of our visit they were being heavily bom- 
barded. On each side of the salient are the 

199 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

French. Across the battle-ground of St. 
Mihiel I could see their trenches facing those 
in which we stood. For, 'at St. Mihiel, in- 
stead of having the line of the enemy only 
in front, the lines face the German, and sur- 
round him on both flanks. Speaking not as 
a military strategist but merely as a partisan, 
if any German commander wants that kind 
of a position I would certainly make him a 
present of it. 

The colonel who commanded the trenches 
possessed an enthusiasm that was beautiful 
to see. He was as proud of his chalk quarry 
as an admiral of his first dreadnaught. He 
was as isolated as though cast upon a rock 
in mid-ocean. Behind him was the dripping 
forest, in front the mud valley filled with 
floating fogs. At his feet in the chalk floor 
the shells had gouged out holes as deep as 
rain-barrels. Other shells were liable at any 
moment to gouge out more holes. Three 
days before, when Prince Arthur of Con- 
naught had come to tea, a shell had hit out- 

200 




From a photograph, copyright by Underwood and Underwood. 

A first-line trench outside of Verdun. 

The trench enfilades the valley beyond, and the valley is covered with barbed wire 
and gun-pits. 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

side the colonel's private cave, and smashed 
all the teacups. It is extremely annoying 
when English royalty drops in sociably to 
distribute medals and sip a cup of tea to 
have German shells invite themselves to the 
party. It is a way German shells have. 
They push in everywhere. One invited itself 
to my party and got within ten feet of it. 
When I complained, the colonel suggested 
absently that it probably was not a German 
shell but a French mine that had gone off 
prematurely. He seemed to think being hit 
by a French mine rather than by a German 
shell made all the difference in the world. 
It nearly did. 

At the moment the colonel was greatly 
interested in the fact that one of his men 
was not carrying a mask against gases. 
The colonel argued that the life of the man 
belonged to France, and that through lazi- 
ness or indifference he had no right to risk 
losing it. Until this war the colonel had com- 
manded in Africa the regiment into which 

201 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

criminals are drafted as a punishment. To 
keep them in hand requires both imagina- 
tion and the direct methods of a bucko 
mate on a whaler. When the colonel was 
promoted to his present command he found 
the men did not place much confidence in 
the gas masks, so he filled a shelter with 
poisoned air, equipped a squad with pro- 
tectors and ordered them to enter. They 
went without enthusiasm, but when they 
found they could move about with impunity 
the confidence of the entire command in the 
anti-gas masks was absolute. 

The colonel was very vigilant against 
these gas attacks. He had equipped the 
only shelter I have seen devoted solely to 
the preparation of defenses against them. 
We learned several new facts concerning 
this hideous form of warfare. One was 
that the Germans now launch the gas most 
frequently at night when the men cannot 
see it approach, and, in consequence, before 
they can snap the masks into place, they 

202 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

are suffocated, and in great agony die. They 
have learned much about the gas, but chiefly 
by bitter experience. Two hours after one 
of the attacks an officer seeking his field- 
glasses descended into his shelter. The gas 
that had flooded the trenches and then 
floated away still lurked below. And in a 
moment the officer was dead. The warn- 
ing was instantly flashed along the trenches 
from the North Sea to Switzerland, and now 
after a gas raid, before any one enters a shel- 
ter, it is attacked by counter-irritants, and 
the poison driven from ambush. 

I have never seen better discipline than 
obtained in that chalk quarry, or better 
spirit. There was not a single outside ele- 
ment to aid discipline or to inspire morale. 
It had all to come from within. It had all 
to spring from the men themselves and 
from the example set by their officers. The 
enemy fought against them, the elements 
fought against them, the place itself was as 
cheerful as a crutch. The clay climbed from 

203 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

their feet to their hips, was ground into their 
uniforms, clung to their hands and hair. 
The rain chilled them, the wind, cold, damp, 
and harsh, stabbed through their greatcoats. 
Their outlook was upon graves, their resting- 
places dark caverns, at which even a wolf 
would look with suspicion. And yet they 
were all smiling, eager, alert. In the whole 
command we saw not one sullen or wistful 
face. 

It is an old saying: "So the colonel, so the 
regiment." 

But the splendid spirit I saw on the heights 
of the Meuse is true not only of that colonel 
and of that regiment, but of the whole five 
hundred miles of trenches, and of all France. 

February, 1916. 
When I was in Verdun, the Germans, from 
a distance of twenty miles, had dropped 
three shells into Nancy and threatened to 
send more. That gave Nancy an interest 
which Verdun lacked. So I was intolerant 

204 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

of Verdun and anxious to hasten on to 
Nancy. 

To-day Nancy and her three shells are 
forgotten, and to all the world the place of 
greatest interest is Verdun. Verdun has 
been Roman, Austrian, and not until 1648 
did she become a part of France. This is 
the fourth time she has been attacked — by 
the Prussians in 1792, again by the Germans 
in 1870, when, after a gallant defense of three 
weeks, she surrendered, and in October of 
1914. 

She then was more menaced than attacked. 
It was the Crown Prince and General von 
Strantz with seven army corps who threat- 
ened her. General Sarrail, now commanding 
the allied forces in Salonika, with three army 
corps, and reinforced by part of an army 
corps from Toul, directed the defense. The 
attack was made upon Fort Troyon, about 
twenty miles south of Verdun. The fort was 
destroyed, but the Germans were repulsed. 
Four days later, September 24, the real at- 

205 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

tack was made fifteen miles south of Troyon, 
on the village of St. Mihiel. The object of 
Von Strantz was to break through the Ver- 
dun-Toul line, to inclose Sarrail from the 
south and at Revigny link arms with the 
Crown Prince. They then would have had 
the army of Sarrail surrounded. 

For several days it looked as though Von 
Strantz would succeed, but, though out- 
numbered, Sarrail's line held, and he forced 
Von Strantz to "dig in" at St. Mihiel. There 
he still is, like a dagger that has failed to 
reach the heart but remains implanted in the 
flesh. 

Von Strantz having failed, a week later, 
on October 3, the Crown Prince attacked 
through the Forest of the Argonne between 
Varennes and Verdun. But this assault also 
was repulsed by Sarrail, who captured Va- 
rennes, and with his left joined up with the 
Fourth Army of General Langle. The line 
as then formed by that victory remained 
much as it is to-day. The present attack 
is directed neither to the north nor south 

206 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

of Verdun, but straight at the forts of the 
city. These forts form but a part of the 
defenses. For twenty miles in front of Ver- 
dun have been spread trenches and barb- 
wire. In turn, these are covered by artillery 
positions in the woods and on every height. 
Even were a fort destroyed, to occupy it the 
enemy must pass over a terrain, every foot 
of which is under fire. As the defense of 
Verdun has been arranged, each of the forts 
is but a rallying-poirit — a base. The actual 
combat that will decide the struggle will be 
fought in the open. 

Last month I was invited to one of the 
Verdun forts. It now lies in the very path 
of the drive, and to describe it would be 
improper. But the approaches to it are 
now what every German knows. They were 
more impressive even than the fort. The 
"glacis" of the fort stretched for a mile, and 
as we walked in the direction of the German 
trenches there was not a moment when from 
every side French guns could not have blown 
us into fragments. They were mounted on 

207 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

ine spurs of the hills, sunk in pits, ambushed 
in the thick pine woods. Every step forward 
was made cautiously between trenches, or 
through mazes of barb-wire and iron hurdles 
with bayonet-like spikes. Even walking lei- 
surely you had to watch your step. Pits 
opened suddenly at your feet, and strands 
of barbed wire caught at your clothing. 
Whichever way you looked trenches flanked 
you. They were dug at every angle, and 
were not farther than fifty yards apart. 

On one side, a half mile distant, was a 
hill heavily wooded. At regular intervals the 
trees had been cut down and uprooted and, 
like a wood-road, a cleared space showed. 
These were the nests of the "seventy-fives." 
They could sweep the approaches to the fort 
as a fire-hose flushes a gutter. That a human 
being should be ordered to advance against 
such pitfalls and obstructions, and under the 
fire from the trenches and batteries, seemed 
sheer murder. Not even a cat with nine lives 

could survive. 

208 



VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL 

The German papers tell that before the 
drive upon Verdun was launched the German 
Emperor reproduced the attack in minia- 
ture. The whereabouts and approaches to 
the positions they were to take were ex- 
plained to the men. Their officers were re- 
hearsed in the part each was to play. But 
no rehearsal would teach a man to avoid 
the pitfalls that surround Verdun. The 
open places are as treacherous as quicksands, 
the forests that seem to him to offer shelter 
are a succession of traps. And if he captures 
one fort he but brings himself under the fire 
of two others. 

From what I saw of the defenses of Verdun 
from a "certain place" three miles outside 
the city to a "certain place" fifteen miles 
farther south, from what the general com- 
manding the Verdun sector told me, and from 
what I know of the French, I believe the 
Crown Prince will find this second attack 
upon Verdun a hundred per cent more costly 
than the first, and equally unsuccessful. 

209 



CHAPTER X 

WAR IN THE VOSGES 

Paris, January, 1916. 

WHEN speaking of their five hundred 
miles of front, the French General 
Staff divide it into twelve sectors. The 
names of these do not appear on maps. 
They are family names and titles, not of 
certain places, but of districts with imag- 
inary boundaries. These nicknames seem 
to thrive best in countries where the same 
race of people have lived for many cen- 
turies. With us, it is usually when we speak 
of mountains, as "in the Rockies," "in the 
Adirondacks," that under one name we merge 
rivers, valleys, and villages. To know the 
French names for the twelve official fronts 
may help in deciphering the communiques. 
They are these: 
Flanders, the first sector, stretches from 
210 



WAR IN THE VOSGES 

the North Sea to beyond Ypres; the Artois 
sector surrounds Arras; the centre of Picardie 
is Amiens; Santerre follows the valley of 
the Oise; Soissonais is the sector that ex- 
tends from Soissons on the Aisne to the 
Champagne sector, which begins with Rheims 
and extends southwest to include Chalons; 
Argonne is the forest of Argonne; the Hautes 
de Meuse, the district around Verdun; 
Woevre lies between the heights of the 
Meuse and the River Moselle; then come 
Lorraine, the Vosges, all hills and forests, 
and last, Alsace, the territory won back from 
the enemy. 

Of these twelve fronts, I was on ten. The 
remaining two I missed through leaving 
France to visit the French fronts in Serbia 
and Salonika. According to which front 
you are on, the trench is of mud, clay, chalk, 
sand-bags, or cement; it is ambushed in gar- 
dens and orchards, it winds through flooded 
mud flats, is hidden behind the ruins of 
wrecked villages, and is paved and rein- 

211 



WAR IN THE VOSGES 

forced with the stones and bricks from the 
smashed houses. 

Of all the trenches the most curious were 
those of the Vosges. They were the most 
curious because, to use the last word one 
associates with trenches, they are the most 
beautiful. 

We started for the trenches of the Vosges 
from a certain place close to the German 
border. It was so close that in the inn a 
rifle-bullet from across the border had bored 
a hole in the cafe mirror. 

The car climbed steadily. The swollen 
rivers flowed far below us, and then disap- 
peared, and the slopes that fell away on 
one side of the road and rose on the other 
became smothered under giant pines. Above 
us they reached to the clouds, below us 
swept grandly across great valleys. There 
was no sign of human habitation, not even 
the hut of a charcoal-burner. Except for 
the road we might have been the first ex- 
plorers of a primeval forest. We seemed as 

212 



WAR IN THE VOSGES 

far removed from the France of cities, culti- 
vated acres, stone bridges, and chateaux as 
Rip Van Winkle lost in the Catskills. The 
silence was the silence of the ocean. 

We halted at what might have been a 
lumberman's camp. There were cabins of 
huge green logs with the moss still fresh 
and clinging, and smoke poured from mud 
chimneys. In the air was an enchanting 
odor of balsam and boiling coffee. It needed 
only a man in a Mackinaw coat with an 
axe to persuade us we had motored from a 
French village ten hundred years old into 
a perfectly new trading-post on the Sas- 
katchewan. 

But from the lumber camp the colonel ap- 
peared, and with him in the lead we started 
up a hill as sheer as a church roof. The 
freshly cut path reached upward in short, 
zigzag lengths. Its outer edge was shored 
with the trunks of the trees cut down to 
make way for it. They were fastened with 
stakes, and against rain and snow helped to 

213 



WAR IN THE VOSGES 

hold it in place. The soil, as the path showed, 
was of a pink stone. It cuts easily, and is 
the stone from which cathedrals have been 
built. That suggests that to an ambitious 
young sapling it offers little nutriment, but 
the pines, at least, seem to thrive on it. 
For centuries they have thrived on it. They 
towered over us to the height of eight stories. 
The ground beneath was hidden by the most 
exquisite moss, and moss climbed far up the 
tree trunks and covered the branches. They 
looked, as though to guard them from the 
cold, they had been swathed in green velvet. 
Except for the pink path we were in a world 
of green — green moss, green ferns, green 
tree trunks, green shadows. The little light 
that reached from above was like that which 
filters through the glass sides of an aquarium. 
It was very beautiful, but was it war? 
We might have been in the Adirondacks 
in the private camp of one of our men of 
millions. You expected to see the fire-war- 
den's red poster warning you to stamp out 

214 



WAR IN THE VOSGES 

the ashes, and to be careful where you threw 
your matches. Then the path dived into a 
trench with pink walls, and, overhead, arches 
of green branches rising higher and higher 
until they interlocked and shut out the 
sky. The trench led to a barrier of logs as 
round as a flour-barrel, the openings plugged 
with moss, and the whole hidden in fresh 
pine boughs. It reminded you of those open 
barricades used in boar hunting, and behind 
which the German Emperor awaits the on- 
slaught of thoroughly terrified pigs. 

Like a bird's nest it clung to the side of the 
hill, and, across a valley, looked at a sister 
hill a quarter of a mile away. 

"On that hill," said the colonel, "on a 
level with us, are the Germans." 

Had he told me that among the pine-trees 
across the valley Santa Claus manufactured 
his toys and stabled his reindeer I would 
have believed him. Had humpbacked dwarfs 
with beards peeped from behind the velvet 
tree trunks and doffed red nightcaps, had we 

215 



WAR IN THE VOSGES 

discovered fairies dancing on the moss carpet, 
the surprised ones would have been the fairies. 

In this enchanted forest to talk of Ger- 
mans and war was ridiculous. We were 
speaking in ordinary tones, but in the still- 
ness of the woods our voices carried, and 
from just below us a dog barked. 

"Do you allow the men to bring dogs into 
the trenches?" I asked. "Don't they give 
away your position?" 

"That is not one of our dogs," said the 
colonel. "That is a German sentry dog. 
He has heard us talking." 

"But that dog is not across that valley," 
I objected. "He's on this hill. He's not 
two hundred yards below us." 

"But, yes, certainly," said the colonel. 
Of the man on duty behind the log barrier 
he asked: 

"How near are they?" 

"Two hundred yards," said the soldier. 
He grinned and, leaning over the top log, 
pointed directly beneath us. 

216 



WAR IN THE VOSGES 

It was as though we were on the roof of a 
house looking over the edge at some one on 
the front steps. I stared down through the 
giant pine-trees towering like masts, mys- 
terious, motionless, silent with the silence of 
centuries. Through the interlacing boughs 
I saw only shifting shadows or, where a shaft 
of sunlight fell upon the moss, a flash of vivid 
green. Unable to believe, I shook my head. 
Even the boche watchdog, now thoroughly 
annoyed, did not convince me. As though 
reading my doubts, an officer beckoned, 
and we stepped outside the breastworks and 
into an intricate cat's-cradle of barbed wire. 
It was lashed to heavy stakes and wound 
around the tree trunks, and, had the officer 
not led the way, it would have been impossible 
for me to get either in or out. At intervals, 
like clothes on a line, on the wires were strung 
empty tin cans, pans and pots, and glass 
bottles. To attempt to cross the entangle- 
ment would have made a noise like a ped- 
dler's cart bumping over cobbles. 

217 



WAR IN THE VOSGES 

We came to the edge of the barb-wire, 
and what looked like part of a tree trunk 
turned into a man-sized bird's nest. The 
sentry in the nest had his back to us, and 
was peering intently down through the 
branches of the tree tops. He remained so 
long motionless that I thought he was not 
aware of our approach. But he had heard us. 
Only it was no part of his orders to make ab- 
rupt movements. With infinite caution, with 
the most considerate slowness, he turned, 
scowled, and waved us back. It was the care 
with which he made even so slight a ges- 
ture that persuaded me the Germans were as 
close as the colonel had said. My curiosity 
concerning them was satisfied. The sentry 
did not need to wave me back. I was al- 
ready on my way. 

At the post of observation I saw a dog- 
kennel. 

"There are watchdogs on our side, also?" 
I said. 

"Yes," the officer assented doubtfully. 
218 



WAR IN THE VOSGES 

"The idea is that their hearing is better than 
that of the men, and in case of night attacks 
they will warn us. But during the day they 
get so excited barking at the boche dogs 
that when darkness comes, and we need 
them, they are worn-out and fall asleep." 

We continued through the forest, and 
wherever we went found men at work re- 
pairing the path and pushing the barb-wire 
and trenches nearer the enemy. In some 
places they worked with great caution as, 
hidden by the ferns, they dragged behind 
them the coils of wire; sometimes they were 
able to work openly, and the forest resounded 
with the blows of axes and the crash of a 
falling tree. But an axe in a forest does not 
suggest war, and the scene was still one of 
peace and beauty. 

For miles the men had lined the path 
with borders of moss six inches wide, and 
with strips of bark had decorated the huts 
and shelters. Across the tiny ravines they 
had thrown what in seed catalogues are 

219 



WAR IN THE VOSGES 

called "rustic" bridges. As we walked in 
single file between these carefully laid bor- 
ders of moss and past the shelters that sug- 
gested only a gamekeeper's lodge, we might 
have been on a walking tour in the Alps. 
You expected at every turn to come upon a 
chalet like a Swiss clock, and a patient cow 
and a young woman in a velvet bodice who 
would offer you warm milk. 

Instead, from overhead, there burst sud- 
denly the barking of shrapnel, and through 
an opening in the tree-tops we saw a French 
biplane pursued by German shells. It was 
late in the afternoon, but the sun was still 
shining and, entirely out of her turn, the 
moon also was shining. In the blue sky she 
hung like a silver shield, and toward her, 
it seemed almost to her level, rose the bi- 
plane. 

She also was all silver. She shone and 
glistened. Like a great bird, she flung out 
tilting wings. The sun kissed them and 
turned them into flashing mirrors. Behind 

220 



WAR IN THE VOSGES 

her the German shells burst in white puffs 
of smoke, feathery, delicate, as innocent- 
looking as the tips of ostrich-plumes. The 
biplane ran before them and seemed to play 
with them as children race up the beach 
laughing at the pursuing waves. The bi- 
plane darted left, darted right, climbed un- 
seen aerial trails, tobogganed down vast im- 
aginary mountains, or, as a gull skims the 
crests of the waves, dived into a cloud and 
appeared again, her wings dripping, glis- 
tening and radiant. As she turned and 
winged her way back to France you felt no 
fear for her. She seemed beyond the power 
of man to harm, something supreme, super- 
human — a sister to the sun and moon, the 
princess royal of the air. 

After you have been in the trenches it 
seems so selfish to be feasting and drinking 
that you have no appetite for dinner. 

But after a visit to the defenders of the 
forests of the Vosges you cannot feel selfish. 
Visits to their trenches do not take away 

221 



WAR IN THE VOSGES 

the appetite. They increase it. The air 
they breathe tastes like brut champagne, 
and gases cannot reach them. They sleep 
on pillows of pine boughs. They look out 
only on what in nature is most beautiful. 
And their surgeon told me there was not 
a single man on the sick-list. That does 
not mean there are no killed or wounded. 
For even in the enchanted forest there is 
no enchantment strong enough to ward off 
the death that approaches crawling on the 
velvet moss, or hurtling through the tree- 
tops. 

War has no knowledge of sectors. It is 
just as hateful in the Vosges as in Flanders, 
only in the Vosges it masks its hideousness 
with what is beautiful. In Flanders death 
hides in a trench of mud like an open grave. 
In the forest of the Vosges it lurks in a nest 
of moss, fern, and clean, sweet-smelling pine. 



222 



CHAPTER XI 

HINTS FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO 
HELP 

Paris, January, 1916. 

AT home people who read of some splen- 
did act of courage or self-sacrifice on 
the part of the Allies, are often moved to ex- 
claim: "I wish I could help! I wish I could 
do something!" 

This is to tell them how easily, at what 
bargain prices, at what little cost to them- 
selves that wish can be gratified. 

In the United States, owing to the war, 
many have grown suddenly rich; those al- 
ready wealthy are increasing their fortunes. 
Here in France the war has robbed every 
one; the rich are less rich, the poor more 
destitute. Every franc any one can spare 
is given to the government, to the Bank of 
France, to fight the enemy and to preserve 
the country. 

223 



HINTS FOR THOSE 

The calls made upon the purses of the 
people never cease, and each appeal is so 
worthy that it cannot be denied. In con- 
sequence, for the war charities there is not 
so much money as there was. People are 
not less willing, but have less to give. So, 
in order to obtain money, those who ask 
must appeal to the imagination, must show 
why the cause for which they plead is the 
most pressing. They advertise just which 
men will benefit, and in what way, whether 
in blankets, gloves, tobacco, masks, or leaves 
of absence. 

Those in charge of the relief organizations 
have learned that those who have money 
to give like to pick and choose. A tale of 
suffering that appeals to one, leaves another 
cold. One gives less for the wounded because 
he thinks those injured in battle are wards 
of the state. But for the children orphaned 
by the war he will give largely. So the 
petitioners dress their shop-windows. 

To the charitably disposed, and over here 
224 



WHO WANT TO HELP 

that means every Frenchman, they offer 
bargains. They have "white sales," "fire 
sales." As, at our expositions, we have spe- 
cial days named after the different States, 
they have special days for the Belgians, 
Poles, and Serbians. 

For these days they prepare long in ad- 
vance. Their approach is heralded, adver- 
tised; all Paris, or it may be the whole of 
France, knows they are coming. 

Christmas Day and the day after were de- 
voted exclusively to the man in the trenches, 
to obtain money to bring him home on leave. 
Those days were Us journees du poilu. 

The services of the best black-and-white 
artists in France were commandeered. For 
advertising purposes they designed the most 
appealing posters. Unlike those issued by 
our suffragettes, calling attention to the im- 
portance of November 2, they gave some 
idea of what was wanted. 

They did not show Burne- Jones young 
women blowing trumpets. They were not 

225 



HINTS FOR THOSE 

symbolical, or allegorical; they were homely, 
pathetic, humorous, human. They were 
aimed straight at the heart and pocketbook. 

They showed the poilu returning home on 
leave, and on surprising his wife or his sweet- 
heart with her hands helpless in the wash- 
tub, kissing her on the back of the neck. In 
the corner the dog danced on his hind legs, 
barking joyfully. 

They showed the men in the trenches, and 
while one stood at the periscope the other 
opened their Christmas boxes; they showed 
father and son shoulder to shoulder march- 
ing through the snow, mud, and sleet; they 
showed the old couple at home with no fire 
in the grate, saying: "It is cold for us, but 
not so cold as for our son in the trench.' ' 

For every contribution to this Christmas 
fund those who gave received a decoration. 
According to the sum, these ran from paper 
badges on a pin to silver and gold medals. 

The whole of France contributed to this 
fund. The proudest shops filled their win- 

226 



WHO WANT TO HELP 

dows with the paper badges, and so well was 
the fund organized that in every town and 
city petitioners in the streets waylaid every 
pedestrian. 

Even in Modena, on the boundary-line 
of Italy, when I was returning to France, 
and sharing a lonely Christmas with the 
conductor of the wagon-lit, we were held up 
by train-robbers, who took our money and 
then pinned medals on us. 

Until we reached Paris we did not know 
why. It was only later we learned that in 
the two days' campaign the poilus was bene- 
fited to the sum of many millions of francs. 

In Paris and over all France, for every 
one is suffering through the war, there is 
some individual or organization at work to 
relieve that suffering. Every one helps, and 
the spirit in which they help is most won- 
derful and most beautiful. No one is for- 
gotten. 

When the French artists were called to 
the front, the artists' models of the Place 

227 



HINTS FOR THOSE 

Pigalle and Montmartre were left destitute. 
They had not "put by." They were butter- 
flies. 

So some women of the industrious, busy- 
bee order formed a society to look after the 
artists' models. They gave them dolls to 
dress, and on the sale of dolls the human 
manikins now live. 

Nor is any one who wants to help allowed 
to feel that he or she is too poor; that for his 
sou or her handiwork there is no need. 
The midinettes, the "cash" girls of the great 
department stores and millinery shops, had 
no money to contribute, so some one thought 
of giving them a chance to help the soldiers 
with their needles. 

It was purposed they should make cock- 
ades in the national colors. Every French 
girl is taught to sew; each is born with good 
taste. They were invited to show their good 
taste in the designing of cockades, which 
people would buy for a franc, which franc 
would be sent to some soldier. 

228 



L'Oeuv\pe ,_ ' . 
eie Is permission du totlu 

des (\egiorjs envables 




Inez Us Restaurateurs . |t roonadiers 

et (^otclicrs parisiens 



A poster inviting the proprietors of restaurants and hotels and their 
guests to welcome the soldiers who have permission to visit 
Paris, especially those who come from the districts invaded by 
the Germans. 



WHO WANT TO HELP 

The French did not go about this in a 
hole-in-a-corner way in a back street. They 
did not let the "cash" girl feel her artistic 
effort was only a blind to help her help 
others. They held a "salon" for the cock- 
ades. 

And they held it in the same Palace of 
Art, where at the annual salon are hung 
the paintings of the great French artists. 
The cockades are exhibited in one hall, and 
next to them is an exhibition of the precious 
tapestries rescued from the Rheims cathedral. 

In the hall beyond that is an exhibition 
of lace. To this, museums, duchesses, and 
queens have sent laces that for centuries 
have been family heirlooms. But the cock- 
ades of Mimi Pinson by the thousands and 
thousands are given just as much space, are 
arranged with the same taste and by the 
same artist who grouped and catalogued the 
queens' lace handkerchiefs. 

And each little Mimi Pinson can go to 
the palace and point to the cockade she 

229 



HINTS FOR THOSE 

made with her own fingers, or point to the 
spot where it was, and know she has sent a 
franc to a soldier of France. 

These days the streets of Paris are filled 
with soldiers, each of whom has given to 
France some part of his physical self. That 
his country may endure, that she may con- 
tinue to enjoy and teach liberty, he has 
seen his arm or his leg, or both, blown off, 
or cut off. But when on the boulevards you 
meet him walking with crutches or with an 
empty sleeve pinned beneath his Cross of 
War, and he thinks your glance is one of 
pity, he resents it. He holds his head more 
stiffly erect. He seems to say: "I know how 
greatly you envy me !" 

And who would dispute him? Long after 
the war is ended, so long as he lives, men 
and women of France will honor him, and in 
their eyes he will read their thanks. But 
there is one soldier who cannot read their 
thanks, who is spared the sight of their 
pity. He is the one who has made all but 

230 



WHO WANT TO HELP 

the supreme sacrifice. He is the one who is 
blind. He sits in perpetual darkness. You 
can remember certain nights that seemed to 
stretch to doomsday, when sleep was with- 
held and you tossed and lashed upon the 
pillow, praying for the dawn. Imagine a 
night of such torture dragged out over many 
years, with the dreadful knowledge that 
the dawn will never come. Imagine Paris 
with her bridges, palaces, parks, with the 
Seine, the Tuileries, the boulevards, the 
glittering shop-windows conveyed to you 
only through noise. Only through the shrieks 
of motor-horns and the shuffling of feet. 

The men who have been blinded in battle 
have lost more than sight. They have been 
robbed of their independence. They feel 
they are a burden. It is not only the physical 
loss they suffer, but the thought that no 
longer are they of use, that they are a care, 
that in the scheme of things — even in their 
own little circles of family and friends — 
there is for them no place. It is not unfair 

231 



HINTS FOR THOSE 

to the poilu to say that the officer who is 
blinded suffers more than the private. As 
a rule, he is more highly strung, more widely 
educated; he has seen more; his experience 
of the world is broader; he has more to lose. 
Before the war he may have been a lawyer, 
doctor, man of many affairs. For him it 
is harder than, for example, the peasant to 
accept a future of unending blackness spent 
in plaiting straw or weaving rag carpets. 
Under such conditions life no longer tempts 
him. Instead, death tempts him, and the 
pistol seems very near at hand. 

It was to save men of the officer class 
from despair and from suicide, to make them 
know that for them there still was a life of 
usefulness, work, and accomplishment, that 
there was organized in France the Com- 
mittee for Men Blinded in Battle. The 
idea was to bring back to officers who had 
lost their sight, courage, hope, and a sense 
of independence, to give them work not 
merely mechanical but more in keeping with 

232 




All over France, on Christmas Day and the day after, money was 
collected to send comforts and things good to eat to the men 
at the front. 



WHO WANT TO HELP 

their education and intelligence. The Presi- 
dent of France is patron of the society, and 
on its committees in Paris and New York 
are many distinguished names. The French 
Government has promised a house near Paris 
where the blind soldiers may be educated. 
When I saw them they were in temporary 
quarters in the Hotel de Crillon, lent to them 
by the proprietor. They had been gathered 
from hospitals in different parts of France 
by Miss Winifred Holt, who for years has 
been working for the blind in her Lighthouse 
in New York. She is assisted in the work 
in Paris by Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt. The 
officers were brought to the Crillon by French 
ladies, whose duty it was to guide them 
through the streets. Some of them also 
were their instructors, and in order to teach 
them to read and write with their ringers 
had themselves learned the Braille alphabet. 
This requires weeks of very close and patient 
study. And no nurse's uniform goes with 
it. But the reward was great. 

233 



HINTS FOR THOSE 

It was evident in the alert and eager in- 
terest of the men who, perhaps, only a week 
before had wished to "curse God, and die." 
But since then hope had returned to each 
of them, and he had found a door open, and 
a new life. 

And he was facing it with the same or 
with even a greater courage than that with 
which he had led his men into the battle 
that blinded him. Some of the officers were 
modelling in clay, others were learning type- 
writing, one with a drawing-board was study- 
ing to be an architect, others were pressing 
their finger-tips over the raised letters of 
the Braille alphabet. 

Opposite each officer, on the other side of 
the table, sat a woman he could not see. 
She might be young and beautiful, as many 
of them were. She might be white-haired 
and a great lady bearing an ancient title, 
from the faubourg across the bridges, but he 
heard only a voice. 

The voice encouraged his progress, or 
234 



WHO WANT TO HELP 

corrected his mistakes, and a hand, de- 
tached and descending from nowhere, guided 
his hand, gently, as one guides the fingers 
of a child. The officer was again a child. 
In life for the second time he was beginning 
with A, B, and C. The officer was tall, 
handsome, and deeply sunburned. In his 
uniform of a chasseur d'Afrique he was a 
splendid figure. On his chest were the 
medals of the campaigns in Morocco and 
Algiers, and the crimson ribbon of the Legion 
of Honor. The officer placed his forefinger 
on a card covered with raised hieroglyphics. 

"N," he announced. 

"No," the voice answered him. 

"M?" His tone did not carry convic- 
tion. 

"You are guessing," accused the voice. 
The officer was greatly confused. 

"No, no, mademoiselle!" he protested. 
"Truly, I thought it was an 'M.' " 

He laughed guiltily. The laugh shook 
you. You saw all that he could never see: 

235 



HINTS FOR THOSE 

inside the room the great ladies and latest 
American countesses, eager to help, forget- 
ful of self, full of wonderful, womanly sym- 
pathy; and outside, the Place de la Concorde, 
the gardens of the Tuileries, the trees of the 
Champs Elysees, the sun setting behind the 
gilded dome of the Invalides. All these were 
lost to him, and yet as he sat in the darkness, 
because he could not tell an N from an M, 
he laughed, and laughed happily. From 
where did he draw his strength and courage ? 
Was it the instinct for life that makes a 
drowning man fight against an ocean? Was 
it his training as an officer of the Grande 
Armee? Was it that spirit of the French 
that is the one thing no German knows, 
and no German can ever break? Or was it 
the sound of a woman's voice and the touch 
of a woman's hand? If the reader wants to 
contribute something to help teach a new 
profession to these gentlemen, who in the 
fight for civilization have contributed their 
eyesight, write to the secretary of the com- 

236 



JOURNEEduPOILU 




p , t/ t, ,\. *■■>-«_ '.'i^n-ruLr &*- /u&t*>*-<-44 <*?**-, 5* <-^ wjw^i fJia*£, 



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^ 31 OCTOBRE ^V|. 
|er NOVEMBRE ^W 



l£MS 



ORGANISEErarTePARLEMENT 



35 



DEVAMRF.7 



A poster advertising the fund to bring from the trenches "permis- 
sionaires," those soldiers who obtain permission to return home 
for six days. 



WHO WANT TO HELP 

mittee, Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, Hotel 
Ritz, Paris. 

There are some other very good bargains. 
Are you a lover of art, and would you be- 
come a patron of art? If that is your wish, 
you can buy an original water-color for fifty 
cents, and so help an art student who is fight- 
ing at the front, and assist in keeping alive his 
family in Paris. Is not that a good bargain ? 

As everybody knows, the Ecole des Beaux- 
Arts in Paris is free to students from all 
the world. It is the alma mater of some of 
the best-known American artists and archi- 
tects. On its rolls are the names of Sargent, 
St. Gaudens, Stanford White, Whitney War- 
ren, Beckwith, Coffin, MacMonnies. 

Certain schools and colleges are so for- 
tunate as to inspire great devotion on the 
part of their students, as, in the story told 
of every college, of the student being led 
from the football field, who struggles in 
front of the grand stand and shouts: "Let 

me go back. I'd die for dear old " 

237 



HINTS FOR THOSE 

But the affection of the students of the 
Beaux-Arts for their masters, their fellow 
students and the institution is very genuine. 

They do not speak of the distinguished 
artists, architects, engravers, and sculptors 
who instruct them as "Doc," or "Prof." 
Instead they call him "master," and no 
matter how often they say it, they say it 
each time as though they meant it. 

The American students, even when they 
return to Paris rich and famous, go at once 
to call upon the former master of their atelier, 
who, it may be, is not at all famous or rich, 
and pay their respects. 

And, no matter if his school of art has 
passed, and the torch he carried is in the 
hands of younger Frenchmen, his former 
pupils still salute him as master, and with 
much the same awe as the village cure shows 
for the cardinal. 

When the war came 3,000 of the French 
students of the Beaux-Arts, past and pres- 
ent, were sent to the front, and there was 

238 



WHO WANT TO HELP 

no one to look after their parents, families, 
or themselves, it seemed a chance for Ameri- 
cans to try to pay back some of the debt so 
many generations of American artists, ar- 
chitects, and sculptors owed to the art of 
France. 

Whitney Warren, the American architect, 
is one of the few Americans who, in spite of 
the extreme unpopularity of our people, is 
still regarded by the French with genuine 
affection. And in every way possible he 
tries to show the French that it is not the 
American people who are neutral, but the 
American Government. 

One of the ways he offers to Americans 
to prove their friendship for France is in 
helping the students of the Beaux-Arts. He 
has organized a committee of French and 
American students which works twelve hours 
a day in the palace of the Beaux-Arts itself, 
on the left bank of the Seine. 

It is hard to understand how in such sur- 
roundings they work, not all day, but at 

239 



HINTS FOR THOSE 

all. The rooms were decorated in the time 
of the first Napoleon; the ceilings and walls 
are white and gold, and in them are inserted 
paintings and panels. The windows look 
into formal gardens and courts filled with 
marble statues and busts, bronze medallions 
and copies of frescoes brought from Athens 
and Rome. In this atmosphere the students 
bang typewriters, fold blankets, nail boxes, 
sort out woollen gloves, cigarettes, loaves of 
bread, and masks against asphyxiating gas. 
The mask they send to the front was in- 
vented by Francis Jacques, of Harvard, one 
of the committee, and has been approved 
by the French Government. 

There is a department which sends out 
packages to the soldiers in the trenches, to 
those who are prisoners, and to the soldiers 
in the hospitals. There is a system of de- 
mand cards on which is a list of what the 
committee is able to supply. In the trenches 
the men mark the particular thing they want 
and return the card. The things most in de- 

240 



WHO WANT TO HELP 

mand seem to be corn-cob pipes and tobacco 
from America, sketch-books, and small boxes 
of water-colors. 

The committee also edits and prints a 
monthly magazine. It is sent to those at 
the front, and gives them news of their fellow 
students, and is illustrated, it is not neces- 
sary to add, with remarkable talent and 
humor. It is printed by hand. The com- 
mittee also supplies the students with post- 
cards on which the students paint pictures 
in water-colors and sign them. Every student 
and ex-student, even the masters paint these 
pictures. Some of them are very valuable. 
At two francs fifty centimes the autograph 
alone is a bargain. In many cases your 
fifty cents will not only make you a patron 
of art, but it may feed a very hungry family. 
Write to Ronald Simmons or Cyrus Thomas, 
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 17 Quai Malaquais. 

There is another very good bargain, and 
extremely cheap. Would you like to lift a 
man bodily out of the trenches, and for six 

241 



HINTS FOR THOSE 

days not only remove him from the imme- 
diate proximity of asphyxiating gas, shells, 
and bullets, but land him, of all places to a 
French soldier the most desired, in Paris? 
Not only land him there, but for six days 
feed and lodge him, and give him a present 
to take away? It will cost you fifteen francs, 
or three dollars. If so, write to Journal des 
Restaurateurs, 24 Rue Richelieu, Paris. 

In Paris, we hear that on Wall Street there 
are some very fine bargains. We hear that 
in gambling in war brides and ammunition 
everybody is making money. Very little of 
that money finds its way to France. Some 
day I may print a list of the names of those 
men in America who are making enormous 
fortunes out of this war, and who have not 
contributed to any charity or fund for the 
relief of the wounded or of their families. 
If you don't want your name on that list 
you might send money to the American 
Ambulance at Neuilly, or to any of the 
6,300 hospitals in France, to the clearing- 

242 



WHO WANT TO HELP 

house, through H. H. Harjes, 31 Boulevard 
Haussman, or direct to the American Red 
Cross. 

Or if you want to help the orphans of 
soldiers killed in battle write to August F. 
Jaccaci, Hotel de Crillon; if you want to 
help the families of soldiers rendered home- 
less by this war, to the Secours National 
through Mrs. Whitney Warren, 16 West 
Forty-Seventh Street, New York; if you 
want to clothe a French soldier against the 
snows of the Vosges send him a Lafayette 
kit. In the clearing-house in Paris I have 
seen on file 20,000 letters from French soldiers 
asking for this kit. Some of them were ad- 
dressed to the Marquis de Lafayette, but the 
clothes will get to the front sooner if you 
forward two dollars to the Lafayette Kit 
Fund, Hotel Vanderbilt, New York. If you 
want to help the Belgian refugees, address 
Mrs. Herman Harjes, Hotel de Crillon, Paris; 
if the Serbian refugees, address Monsieur 
Vesnitch, the Serbian minister to France. 

H3 



HINTS FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO HELP 

If among these bargains you cannot find 
one to suit you, you should consult your 
doctor. Tell him there is something wrong 
with your heart. 



244 



CHAPTER XII 

LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

February, 1916. 

A YEAR ago you could leave the Conti- 
nent and enter England by showing a 
passport and a steamer ticket. To-day it 
is as hard to leave Paris, and no one ever 
wants to leave Paris, as to get out of jail; 
as difficult to invade England as for a rich 
man to enter the kingdom of heaven. To 
leave Paris for London you must obtain the 
permission of the police, the English consul- 
general, and the American consul-general. 
That gets you only to Havre. The Paris 
train arrives at Havre at nine o'clock at 
night, and while the would-be passengers 
for the Channel boat to Southampton are 
waiting to be examined, they are kept on 
the wharf in a goods-shed. An English ser- 
geant hands each of them a ticket with a 

245 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

number, and when the number is called the 
passenger enters a room on the shed where 
French and English officials put him, or her, 
through a third degree. The examination is 
more or less severe, and sometimes the pas- 
senger is searched. 

There is nothing on the wharf to eat or 
drink, and except trunks nothing on which 
to sit. If you prefer to be haughty and 
stand, there is no law against that. Should 
you leave the shed for a stroll, you would 
gain nothing, for, as it is war-time, at nine 
o'clock every restaurant and cafe in Havre 
closes, and the town is so dark you would 
probably stroll into the harbor. 

So, like emigrants on our own Ellis Island, 
English and French army and navy officers, 
despatch bearers, American ambulance driv- 
ers, Red Cross nurses, and all the other 
picturesque travellers of these interesting 
times, shiver, yawn, and swear from nine 
o'clock until midnight. To make it harder, 
the big steamer that is to carry you across 

246 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

the Channel is drawn up to the wharf not 
forty feet way, all lights and warmth and 
cleanliness. At least ten men assured me 
they would return to Havre and across the 
street from the examination-shed start an 
all-night restaurant. After a very few min- 
utes of standing around in the rain it was a 
plan to get rich quick that would have oc- 
curred to almost any one. 

My number was forty-three. After seeing 
only five people in one hour pass through the 
examination-room, I approached a man of 
proud bearing, told him I was a detective, 
and that I had detected he was from Scot- 
land Yard. He looked anxiously at his feet. 

"How did you detect that?" he asked. 

"Your boots are all right," I assured him. 
"It's the way you stand with your hands 
behind your back." 

By shoving his hands into his pockets he 
disguised himself, and asked what I wanted. 
I wanted to be put through the torture- 
chamber ahead of all the remaining pas- 

247 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

sengers. He asked why he should do that. 
I showed him the letter that, after weeks of 
experiment, I found of all my letters, was 
the one that produced the quickest results. 
It is addressed vaguely, "To His Majesty's 
Officers." I call it Exhibit A. 

I explained that for purposes of getting 
me out of the goods-shed and on board the 
steamer he could play he was one of his 
Majesty's officers. The idea pleased him. 
He led me into the examination-room, where, 
behind a long table, like inspectors in a vot- 
ing-booth on election day, sat French police 
officials, officers of the admiralty, army, 
consular, and secret services. Some were 
in uniform, some in plain clothes. From 
above, two arc-lights glared down upon them 
and on the table covered with papers. 

In two languages they were examining a 
young Englishwoman who was pale, ill, and 
obviously frightened. 

"What is your purpose in going to Lon- 
don?" asked the French official. 

248 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

"To join my children." 

To the French official it seemed a good 
answer. As much as to say: "Take the 
witness," he bowed to his English colleagues. 

"If your children are in London," de- 
manded one, "what are you doing in France ? " 

"I have been at Amiens, nursing my hus- 
band." 

"Amiens is inside our lines. Who gave 
you permission to remain inside our lines?" 

The woman fumbled with some papers. 

"I have a letter," she stammered. 

The officer scowled at the letter. Out 
of the corner of his mouth he said: "Permit 
from the 'W. O.' Husband, Captain in the 
Berkshires. Wounded at La Bassee." 

He was already scratching his vise upon 
her passport. As he wrote, he said, cor- 
dially: "I hope your husband is all right 
again." The woman did not reply. So 
long was she in answering that they looked 
up at her. She was chilled with waiting in 
the cold rain. She had been on a strain, and 

249 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

her lips began to tremble. To hide that fact, 
and with no intention of being dramatic, she 
raised her hand, and over her face dropped 
a black veil. 

The officer half rose. 

"You should have told us at once, mad- 
am," he said. He jerked his head at the 
detective and ' toward the door, and the 
detective picked up her valise, and asked 
her please to follow. At the door she looked 
back, and the row of officials, like one man, 
bent forward. 

One of them was engaged in studying my 
passport. It had been viseed by the rep- 
resentatives of all the civilized powers, and 
except the Germans and their fellow gun- 
men, most of the uncivilized. The officer was 
fascinated with it. Like a jig-saw puzzle, it 
appealed to him. He turned it wrong side 
up and sideways, and took so long about it 
that the others, hoping there was something 
wrong, in anticipation scowled at me. But 
the officer disappointed them. 

250 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

"Very interestin'," he said. "You ought 
to frame it." 

Now that I was free to leave the detention 
camp I perversely felt a desire to remain. 
Now that I was free, the sight of all the 
other passengers kicking each other's heels 
and being herded by Tommies gave me a 
feeling of infinite pleasure. I tried to ex- 
press this by forcing money on the detective, 
but he absolutely refused it. So, instead, I 
offered to introduce him to a King's mes- 
senger. We went in search of the King's 
messenger. I was secretly alarmed lest he 
had lost himself. Since we had left the Bal- 
kans together he had lost nearly everything 
else. He had set out as fully equipped as 
the white knight, or a "temp. sec. lieuten- 
ant." But his route was marked with lost 
trunks, travelling-bags, hat-boxes, umbrellas, 
and receipts for reservations on steamships, 
railroad-trains, in wagon-lits, and dining-cars. 

A King's messenger has always been to 
me a fascinating figure. In fiction he is 

251 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

resourceful, daring, ubiquitous. He shows 
his silver staff, with its running greyhound, 
which he inherits from the days of Henry 
VIII, and all men must bow before it. To 
speed him on his way, railroad-carriages are 
emptied, special trains are thrown together, 
steamers cast off only when he arrives. So 
when I found for days I was to travel in 
company with a King's messenger I fore- 
saw a journey of infinite ease and comfort. 
It would be a royal progress. His ever-pres- 
ent, but invisible, staff of secret agents 
would protect me. I would share his special 
trains, his suites of deck cabins. But it was 
not like that. My King's messenger was 
not that kind of a King's messenger. In- 
deed, when he left the Levant, had it not 
been for the man from Cook's, he would 
never have found his way from the hotel to 
the right railroad-station. And that he now 
is safely in London is because at Patras we 
rescued him from a boatman who had placed 
him unresisting on a steamer for Australia. 

252 



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'Very interestin'. You ought to frame it. 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

I pointed him out to the detective. He 
recalled him as the gentleman who had 
blocked the exit gate at the railroad-station. 
I suggested that that was probably because 
he had lost his ticket. 

"Lost his ticket! A King's messenger!" 
The detective was indignant with me. "Im- 
possible, sir!" 

I told him the story of the drunken bands- 
man returning from the picnic. "You can't 
have lost your ticket," said the guard. 

"Can't I?" exclaimed the bandsman tri- 
umphantly. "I've lost the bass-drum!" 

Scotland Yard reproved the K. M. with 
deference, but severely. 

"You should have told us at once, sir," 
he said, "that you were carrying despatches. 
If you'd only shown your credentials, we'd 
had you safe on board two hours ago." 

The King's messenger blushed guiltily. 
He looked as though he wanted to run. 

"Don't tell me," I cried, "you've lost 
your credentials, too!" 

253 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

" Don't be an ass ! " cried the K. M. " I've 
mislaid them, that's all." 

The detective glared at him as though he 
would enjoy leading him to the moat in the 
tower. 

"You've been robbed!" he gasped. 

"Have you looked," I asked, "in the un- 
likely places ? " 

"I always look there first," explained the 
K. M. 

"Look again," commanded the detective. 

Unhappily, the K. M. put his hand in 
his inside coat pocket and, with intense 
surprise, as though he had performed a con- 
juring trick, produced a paper that creaked 
and crinkled. 

"That's it!" he cried. 

"You come with me," commanded Scot- 
land Yard, "before you lose it again." 

Two nights later, between the acts at 
a theatre, I met a young old friend. Twenty 
years before we had made a trip through 
Central America and Venezuela. To my 

254 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

surprise, for I had known him in other wars, 
he was not in khaki, but in white waistcoat 
and lawn tie and tail-coat. He looked as 
though he had on his hand nothing more 
serious than money and time. I complained 
that we had not met since the war. 

"It's a chance, our meeting to-night," 
he said, "for I start for Cairo in the morning. 
I left the Dardanelles last Wednesday and 
arrived here only to-day." 

"Wednesday!" I exclaimed. "How could 
you do it?" 

"Torpedo-boat from Moudros to Malta," 
he explained, "transport to Marseilles, troop 
train to Calais, and there our people shot 
me across the Channel on a hospital ship. 
Then I got a special to town." 

"You are a swell!" I gasped. "What's 
your rank?" 

"Captain." 

That did not explain it. 

"What's your job?" 

"King's messenger." 
255 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

It was not yet nine-thirty. The anti- 
treating law would not let me give him a 
drink, but I led him to where one was. For 
he had restored my faith. He had replaced 
on his pedestal my favorite character in 
fiction. 

On returning to London for the fourth 
time since the war began, but after an ab- 
sence of months, one finds her much nearer 
to the field of operations. A year ago her 
citizens enjoyed the confidence that comes 
from living on an island. Compared with 
Paris, where at Claye the enemy was within 
fifteen miles, and, at the Forest of Mont- 
morency, within ten miles, London seemed 
as far removed from the front as Montreal. 
Since then, so many of her men have left for 
the front and not returned, so many German 
air-ships have visited her, and inhumanly as- 
sassinated her children and women, that she 
seems a part of it. A year ago an officer en- 
tering a restaurant was conscious of his uni- 
form. To-day, anywhere in London, a man 

256 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

out of uniform, or not wearing a khaki arm- 
let, is as conspicuous as a scarlet letter-box. 
A year ago the lamps had been so darkened 
that it was not easy to find the keyhole to 
your street door. Now you are in luck if you 
find the street. Nor does that mean you 
have lingered long at dinner. For after nine- 
thirty nowhere in London can you buy a 
drink, not at your hotel, not even at your 
club. At nine-thirty the waiter whisks your 
drink off the table. What happens to it 
after that, only the waiter knows. 

A year ago the only women in London in 
uniform were the nurses. Now so many 
are in uniform that to one visitor they pre- 
sented the most surprising change the war 
has brought to that city. Those who live 
in London, to whom the change has come 
gradually, are probably hardly aware how 
significant it is. Few people, certainly few 
men, guessed that so many positions that 
before the war were open only to men, could 
be filled quite as acceptably by women. Only 

257 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

the comic papers guessed it. All that they 
ever mocked at, all the suffragettes and 
"equal rights" women ever hoped for seems 
to have come true. Even women policemen. 
True, they do not take the place of the real, 
immortal London bobby, neither do the 
"special constables," but if a young girl is 
out late at night with her young man in 
khaki, she is held up by a policewoman and 
sent home. And her young man in khaki 
dare not resist. 

In Paris, when the place of a man who 
had been mobilized was taken by his wife, 
sister, or daughter, no one was surprised. 
Frenchwomen have for years worked in 
partnership with men to a degree unknown 
in England. They helped as bookkeepers, 
shopkeepers; in the restaurant they always 
handled the money; in the theatres the ush- 
ers and box openers were women; the gov- 
ernment tobacco-shops were run by women. 
That Frenchwomen were capable, efficient, 
hard working was as trite a saying as that 

258 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

the Japanese are a wonderful little people. 
So when the men went to the front and the 
women carried on their work, they were 
only proving a proverb. 

But in England careers for women, out- 
side those of governess, typist, barmaid, or 
show girl, which entailed marrying a marquis, 
were as few as votes. The war has changed 
that. It gave woman her chance, and she 
jumped at it. "When Johnny Comes March- 
ing Home Again" he will find he must look 
for a man's job, and that men's jobs no longer 
are sinecures. In his absence women have 
found out, and, what is more important, the 
employers have found out that to open a 
carriage door and hold an umbrella over a 
customer is not necessarily a man's job. 
The man will have to look for a position his 
sister cannot fill, and, judging from the pres- 
ent aspect of London, those positions are rap- 
idly disappearing. 

That in the ornamental jobs, those that 
are relics of feudalism and snobbery, women 

259 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

should supplant men is not surprising. To 
wear gold lace and touch your hat and 
whistle for a taxicab, if the whistle is a me- 
chanical one, is no difficult task. It never 
was absolutely necessary that a butler and 
two men should divide the labor of serving 
one cup of coffee, one lump of sugar, and 
one cigarette. A healthy young woman 
might manage all three tasks and not faint. 
So the innovation of female butlers and foot- 
men is not important. But many of the jobs 
now held in London by women are those 
which require strength, skill, and endurance. 
Pulling on the steel rope of an elevator and 
closing the steel gates for eight hours a day 
require strength and endurance; and yet 
in all the big department stores the lifts are 
worked by girls. Women also drive the vans, 
and dragging on. the brake of a brewery- 
wagon and curbing two draft-horses is a 
very different matter from steering one of 
the cars that made peace hateful. Not 
that there are no women chauffeurs. They 

260 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

are everywhere. You see them driving lorries, 
business cars, private cars, taxicabs, ambu- 
lances. 

In men's caps and uniforms of green, 
gray, brown, or black, and covered to the 
waist with a robe, you mistake them for 
boys. The other day I saw a motor-truck 
clearing a way for itself down Piccadilly. 
It was filled with over two dozen Tommies, 
and driven recklessly by a girl in khaki of 
not more than eighteen years. How many 
indoor positions have been taken over by 
women one can only guess; but if they are 
in proportion to the out-of-door jobs now 
filled by women and girls, it would seem as 
though half the work in London was carried 
forward by what we once were pleased to 
call the weaker sex. To the visitor there ap- 
pear to be regiments of them. They look 
very businesslike and smart in their uni- 
forms, and whatever their work is they are 
intent upon it. As a rule, when a woman 
attempts a man's work she is conscious. 

261 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

She is more concerned with the fact that 
she is holding down a man's job than with 
the job. Whether she is a lady lawyer, lady 
doctor, or lady journalist, she always is sur- 
prised to find herself where she is. The girls 
and women you see in uniform by the thou- 
sands in London seem to have overcome 
that weakness. They are performing a man's 
work, and their interest is centred in the 
work, not in the fact that a woman has made 
a success of it. If, after this, women in Eng- 
land want the vote, and the men won't give 
it to them, the men will have a hard time 
explaining why. 

During my few days in England, I found 
that what is going forward in Paris for blind 
French officers is being carried on in London 
at St. Dunstan's, Regent's Park, for blind 
Tommies. At this school the classes are 
much larger than are those in Paris, the 
pupils more numerous, and they live and 
sleep on the premises. The premises are 
very beautiful. They consist of seventeen 

262 




From a photograph by Brown Bros. 

" They have women policemen now." 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

acres of gardens, lawns, trees, a lake, and a 
stream on which you can row and swim, 
situated in Regent's Park and almost in the 
heart of London. In the days when London 
was farther away the villa of St. Dunstan's 
belonged to the eccentric Marquis of Hert- 
ford, the wicked Lord Steyne of Thackeray's 
"Vanity Fair." It was a country estate. 
Now the city has closed in around it, but it 
is still a country estate, with ceilings by the 
Brothers Adam, portraits by Romney, side- 
boards by Sheraton, and on the lawn sheep. 
To keep sheep in London is as expensive as 
to keep race-horses, and to own a country 
estate in London can be afforded only by 
Americans. The estate next to St. Dun- 
stan's is owned by an American lady. I 
used to play lawn-tennis there with her 
husband. Had it not been for the horns of 
the taxicabs we might have been a hundred 
miles from the nearest railroad. Instead, 
we were so close to Baker Street that one 
false step would have landed us in Mme. 

263 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

Tussaud's. When the war broke out the 
husband ceased hammering tennis-balls, and 
hammered German ships of war. He sank 
several — and is now waiting impatiently 
outside of Wilhelmshaven for more. 

St. Dunstan's also is owned by an Amer- 
ican, Otto Kahn, the banker. In peace 
times, in the winter months, Mr. Kahn makes 
it possible for the people of New York to 
listen to good music at the Metropolitan 
Opera House. When war came, at his coun- 
try place in London he made it next to pos- 
sible for the blind to see. He gave the key 
of the estate to C. Arthur Pearson. He also 
gave him permission in altering St. Dun- 
stan's to meet the needs of the blind to go 
as far as he liked. 

When I first knew Arthur Pearson he and 
Lord Northcliffe were making rival collec- 
tions of newspapers and magazines. They 
collected them as other people collect postal 
cards and cigar-bands. Pearson was then, 
as he is now, a man of the most remarkable 

264 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

executive ability, of keen intelligence, of 
untiring nervous energy. That was ten years 
ago. He knew then that he was going blind. 
And when the darkness came he accepted 
the burden; not only his own, but he took 
upon his shoulders the burden of all the 
blind in England. He organized the Na- 
tional Institute for those who could not see. 
He gave them of his energy, which has not 
diminished; he gave them of his fortune, 
which, happily for them, has not diminished; 
he gave them his time, his intelligence. If 
you ask what the time of a blind man is 
worth, go to St. Dunstan's and you will 
find out. You will see a home and school 
for blind men, run by a blind man. The 
same efficiency, knowledge of detail, in- 
tolerance of idleness, the same generous ap- 
preciation of the work of others, that he put 
into running The Express and Standard, he 
now exerts at St. Dunstan's. It has Pear- 
son written all over it just as a mile away 
there is a building covered with the name of 

265 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

Selfridge, and a cathedral with the name of 
Christopher Wren. When I visited him in 
his room at St. Dunstan's he was standing 
with his back to the open fire dictating to a 
stenographer. He called to me cheerily, 
caught my hand, and showed me where I 
was to sit. All the time he was looking 
straight at me and firing questions: 

"When did you leave Salonika? How 
many troops have we landed? Our posi- 
tions are very strong, aren't they?" 

He told the stenographer she need not 
wait, and of an appointment he had which 
she was not to forget. Before she reached 
the door he remembered two more things she 
was not to forget. The telephone rang, and, 
still talking, he walked briskly around a 
sofa, avoided a table and an armchair, and 
without fumbling picked up the instru- 
ment. What he heard was apparently very 
good news. He laughed delightedly, saying: 
"That's fine ! That's splendid !" 

A secretary opened the door and tried to 
266 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

tell him what he had just learned, but was 
cut short. 

"I know," said Pearson. "So-and-so has 
just phoned me. It's fine, isn't it?" 

He took a small pad from his pocket, 
made a note on it, and laid the memorandum 
beside the stenographer's machine. Then 
he wound his way back to the fireplace and 
offered a case of cigarettes. He held them 
within a few inches of my hand. Since I 
last had seen him he had shaved his mus- 
tache and looked ten years younger and, as 
he exercises every morning, very fit. He 
might have been an officer of the navy out 
of uniform. I had been in the room five 
minutes, and only once, when he wrote on 
the pad and I saw that as he wrote he did 
not look at the pad, would I have guessed 
that he was blind. 

"What we teach them here," he said, 
firing the words as though from a machine- 
gun, "is that blindness is not an ' affliction. ' 
We won't allow that word. We teach them 

267 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

to be independent. Sisters and the mothers 
spoil them ! Afraid they'll bump their shins. 
Won't let them move about. Always lead- 
ing them. That's bad, very bad. Makes 
them think they're helpless, no good, in- 
valids for life. We teach 'em to strike out 
for themselves. That's the way to put heart 
into them. Make them understand they're 
of use, that they can help themselves, help 
others, learn a trade, be self-supporting. 
We trained them to row. Some of them 
never had had oars in their hands except 
on the pond at Hempstead Heath on a 
bank holiday. We trained a crew that 
swept the river." 

It was fine to see the light in his face. 
His enthusiasm gave you a thrill. He might 
have been Guy Nickalls telling how the 
crew he coached won at New London. 

"They were the best crews, too. Uni- 
versity crews. Of course, our coxswain could 
see, but the crew were blind. We've not 
only taught them to row, we've taught them 

268 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

to support themselves, taught them trades. 
All men who come here have lost their eye- 
sight in battle in this war, but already we 
have taught some of them a trade and set 
them up in business. And while the war 
lasts business will be good for them. And it 
must be nursed and made to grow. So we 
have an 'after-care' committee. To care for 
them after they have left us. To buy raw 
material, to keep their work up to the mark, 
to dispose of it. We need money for those 
men. For the men who have started life 
again for themselves. Do you think there 
are people in America who would like to 
help those men?" 

I asked, in case there were such people, 
to whom should they write. 

"To me," he said, "St. Dunstan's, Re- 
gent's Park."* 

I found the seventeen acres of St. Dun- 
stan's so arranged that no blind man could 

* In New York, the Permanent Blind Relief War Fund 
for Soldiers and Sailors of Great Britain, France, and Bel- 

269 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

possibly lose his way. In the house, over 
the carpets, were stretched strips of mat- 
ting. So long as a man kept his feet on mat- 
ting he knew he was on the right path to 
the door. Outside the doors hand-rails 
guided him to the workshops, schoolrooms, ex- 
ercising-grounds, and kitchen-gardens. Just 
before he reached any of these places a brass 
knob on the hand-rail warned him to go 
slow. Were he walking on the great stone 
terrace and his foot scraped against a board 
he knew he was within a yard of a flight of 
steps. Wherever you went you found men 
at work, learning a trade, or, having learned 
one, intent in the joy of creating something. 
To help them there are nearly sixty ladies, 
who have mastered the Braille system and 
come daily to teach it. There are many 
other volunteers, who take the men on walks 

gium is working in close association with Mr. Pearson. 
With him on the committee, are Robert Bacon, Elihu Root, 
Myron T. Herrick, Whitney Warren, Lady Arthur Paget, 
and George Alexander Kessler. The address of the fund is 
3$o Fifth Avenue. 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

around Regent's Park and who talk and read 
to them. Everywhere was activity. Every- 
where some one was helping some one: the 
blind teaching the blind; those who had 
been a week at St. Dunstan's doing the 
honors to those just arrived. The place 
spoke only of hard work, mutual help, and 
cheerfulness. When first you arrived you 
thought you had over the others a certain 
advantage, but when you saw the work the 
blind men were turning out, which they could 
not see, and which you knew with both your 
eyes you never could have turned out, you 
felt apologetic. There were cabinets, for 
instance, measured to the twentieth of an 
inch, and men who were studying to be 
masseurs who, only by touch, could dis- 
tinguish all the bones in the body. There 
was Miss Woods, a blind stenographer. I 
dictated a sentence to her, and as fast as I 
spoke she took it down on a machine in 
the Braille alphabet. It appeared in raised 
figures on a strip of paper like those that 

271 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

carry stock quotations. Then, reading the 
sentence with her fingers, she pounded it 
on an ordinary typewriter. Her work was 
faultless. 

What impressed you was the number of 
the workers who, over their task, sang or 
whistled. None of them paid any attention 
to what the others were whistling. Each 
acted as though he were shut off in a world 
of his own. The spirits of the Tommies were 
unquenchable. 

Thorpe Five was one of those privates 
who are worth more to a company than the 
sergeant-major. He was a comedian. He 
looked like John Bunny, and when he laughed 
he shook all over, and you had to laugh with 
him, even though you were conscious that 
Thorpe Five had no eyes and no hands. 
But was he conscious of that? Apparently 
not. Was he down-hearted? No! Some 
one snatched his cigarette; and with the 
stumps of his arms he promptly beat two 
innocent comrades over the head. When 

272 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

the lady guide interfered and admitted it 
was she who had robbed him, Thorpe Five 
roared in delight. 

"I bashed 'em!" he cried. "Her took 
it, but I bashed the two of 'em!" 

A private of the Munsters was weaving 
a net, and, as though he were quite alone, 
singing, in a fine barytone, "Tipperary." 
If you want to hear real close harmony, you 
must listen to Southern darkeys; and if you 
want to get the sweetness and melancholy 
out of an Irish chant, an Irishman must 
sing it. I thought I had heard "Tipperary" 
before several times, and that it was a march. 
I found I had not heard it before, and that 
it is not a march, but a lament and a love- 
song. The soldier did not know we were 
listening, and while his fingers wove the 
meshes of the net, his voice rose in tones of 
the most moving sweetness. He did not 
know that he was facing a window, he did 
not know that he was staring straight out 
upon the city of London. But we knew, and 

273 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

when in his rare barytone and rare brogue 
he whispered rather than sang the lines: 

" Good-by, Piccadilly — 

Farewell, Leicester Square, 
It's a long, long way to Tipperary " 

— all of his unseen audience hastily fled. 

There was also Private Watts, who was 
mending shoes. When the week before Lord 
Kitchener visited St. Dunstan's, Watts had 
joked with him. I congratulated him on 
his courage. 

"What was your joke?" I inquired. 

"He asked me when I was a prisoner with 
the Germans how they fed me, and I said: 
'Oh, they gave me five beefsteaks a day.' " 

"That was a good joke," I said. "Did 
Kitchener think so?" 

The man had been laughing, pleased and 
proud. Now the blank eyes turned wist- 
fully to my companion. 

"Did his lordship smile?" he asked. 

Those blind French officers at the Crillon 
274 



LONDON, A YEAR LATER 

in Paris and these English Tommies are 
teaching a great lesson. They are teaching 
men who are whining over the loss of money, 
health, or a job, to be ashamed. It is not 
we who are helping them, but they who are 
helping us. They are showing us how to 
face disaster and setting an example of real 
courage. Those who do not profit by it are 
more blind than they. 

The End. 



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